by Jane Dunn
His concern for the right and proper conduct of a young English gentleman abroad was just part of the wide-ranging advice contained in his extraordinarily popular book that illuminated the preoccupations, inner struggles and expected conduct of the seventeenth-century English gentleman (and woman too, where their lives crossed). Published in Oxford in 1656, it was devoured by the scholars there and within two years went to five editions. It was written for William’s and Dorothy’s generation and its avid readers felt Osborne was speaking directly to them, and his comprehensive edicts on education, love and marriage, travel, government and religion were closely consulted. It was written in a worldly, practical and authoritative tone of voice, occasionally embellished with cynical wit and flights of rhetorical fancy.
A couple of years after it was first published, the book was suppressed for a while by the vice-chancellor of the university in response to several complaints by local vicars that it encouraged atheism. Half-hearted suppression by elderly members of the establishment, however, would only add to its lustre among the young. Samuel Pepys, twenty-three when it was first published, was part of the generation of aspiring young bloods to whom this book was addressed. He took note of its advice on neatness of dress, reflecting glumly on his own untidiness and the loss of social confidence this caused him. The Oxford professor of anatomy, founder member of the Royal Society (and inventor of the catamaran), the brilliant Sir William Petty, admitted in a casual conversation with Pepys in a city coffee house in January 1664 ‘that in all his life these three books were the most esteemed and generally cried up for wit in the world – Religio Medici,* Osborne’s Advice to a Son, and Hudibras’.† To be in such company was elevated indeed.
It took the distance of the next century, however, to kick the Advice into touch: Dr Johnson aimed his boot at its author, ‘A conceited fellow. Were a man to write so now, the boys would throw stones at him.’ This outburst had been in response to Boswell’s praise of Osborne’s work, although Boswell stuck doggedly to his original opinion that here was a writer ‘in whom I have found much shrewd and lively sense’.40
No young man’s education was complete without some kind of sexual adventure and William was no exception. His warm emotions and romantic temperament protected him from cynicism but made him susceptible to love – the most important thing, he maintained, in his life. In his youth William appears to have had an enjoyable time, hardly surprising given his age and the fact that he was strikingly handsome, healthy and full of an exuberant energy that needed more expression than merely tennis. Unfortunately he was rash enough to boast, when he was middle-aged, to Laurence Hyde,‡ an upwardly mobile politician who did not repay his friendship, of the sexual prowess of his youth. The much younger man found this distasteful in someone almost old enough to be his father and committed his disapproval to paper: ‘[Temple] held me in discourse a great long hour of things most relating to himself, which are never without vanity; but this was especially full of it, and some stories of his amours, and extraordinary abilities that way, which had once upon a time nearly killed him’.41 A kinder interpretation of William’s character in this revealing aside is that, older and physically impaired with gout, he wished to share his pleasure and amusement in the memory of a more vigorous and younger self.
Inevitably Francis Osborne’s handbook had an answer to the unchecked male libido. Predictably cynical about marriage, he was suspicious of love and fearful of where sexual desire could lead: he painted a ghastly picture of what horrors awaited a man who chose a woman as his wife because he found her attractive or thought he loved her: ‘Those Vertues, Graces, and reciprocal Desires, bewitched Affection expected to meet and enjoy, Fruition and Experience will find absent, and nothing left but a painted Box, which Children and time will empty of Delight; leaving Diseases behind, or, at best, incurable Antiquity.’42 Escape from such a snare and delusion as sexual love, he believed, was best effected by leaving the object of your desire and crossing the sea. But of course journeys abroad also brought unexpected meetings, unfamiliar freedoms and adventure of every kind.
* * *
* Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) embodied the Elizabethan ideal, being not only a man of culture and a leading literary figure but also someone at ease in the worlds of politics and military action. His early death sent his reputation skywards, the touch paper lit by his spectacular funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, the propellant being posthumous publication of his prose and poetic works.
† Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1566–1601), courtier and soldier of grandiose ambition. Favourite of an ageing queen, his desire for power and military glory, allied to arrogance and incompetence, in the end alienated everyone, apart from the populace to whom he remained a flamboyant hero. A half-baked plot against Elizabeth I forced her hand and, in his thirty-fifth year, he was tried and executed, to the dismay of the queen and her people.
‡ Petrus Ramus (1515–72) was a French humanist and logician who argued against scholasticism, insisting the general should come before the specific, consideration of the wood before the trees. As professor of philosophy at the Collège de France, his eloquence and controversial stand regularly attracted audiences of 2,000 or more. Attacks on him became even more virulent when he converted to Protestantism; he perished finally in the conflagration of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
* Master of the Rolls is an ancient office where the holder originally was keeper of the national records, acting as secretary of state and lord chancellor’s assistant. Judicial responsibilities were gradually added over the centuries until the present day when the Master of the Rolls presides over the civil division of the Court of Appeal and is second in the judicial hierarchy, behind the lord chief justice.
* For a detailed discussion of the constituents and aims of the Junto, see The Noble Revolt, John Adamson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).
* Henry Peacham (1576–1643) rather confusingly was the writer and poet son of the curate Henry Peacham (1546–1634) who was himself well known for his book on rhetoric, The Garden of Eloquence (1577). Lack of funds meant the younger Peacham was ‘Rawlie torn’ in 1598 from his student life at Cambridge to make his way in the world. He became a master of the free school at Wymondham, Norfolk, where he encountered the brutal schooling of boys that he reluctantly accepted as necessary if they were to be educated. He made his name with The Compleat Gentleman (1622), a book that was keenly read in the New England colonies, and possibly was responsible for its author’s name being immortalised in the naming of Peacham, Vermont.
* Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), an English philosopher opposed to Thomas Hobbes and leader of the Cambridge Platonists. Master of Clare Hall and then of Christ’s College, Cambridge and professor of Hebrew. He had an intellectual daughter, Damaris, Lady Masham, who became a friend of the philosophers John Locke and Leibniz.
† The Cambridge Platonists were a group of philosophers in the middle of the seventeenth century who believed that religion and reason should always be in harmony. Although closer in sympathy to the Puritan view, with its valuing of individual experience, they argued for moderation in religion and politics and like Abelard promoted a mystical understanding of reason as a pathway to the divine.
* Henry St John, Viscount Bolinbroke (1678–1751), an ambitious and unscrupulous politician and favourite of Queen Anne’s. He turned his brilliant gifts to writing philosophical and political tracts. His philosophical writings were closely based on the philosopher John Locke’s (1632–1704) inductive approach to knowledge, reasoning from observations to generalisations (to which Ralph Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists were opposed). Few were published in his lifetime. He died, after a long life, a disappointed man.
* The use of uncouched is interesting. It can mean rampant, the opposite of the heraldic term couchant, but more to the point uncouched also refers to an animal that has been driven from its lair. The image of a beast unleashed is very appropriate here, for it expressed Osborne’s fear, fascination and r
ecoil from homosexuality: already he had referred to it as ‘noisom Bestiality’, but also that telling parenthesis revealed a curiosity about the ‘delight I know not’.
* Religio Medici was Sir Thomas Browne’s (1605–82) famous meditation on matters of faith, humanity and love, first published in 1642, reprinted often and translated into many languages. As a doctor and a Christian he illuminated his tolerant, wide-ranging thesis with classical allusions, poetry and philosophy.
† Written by Samuel Butler (1613–80), Hudibras was a mock romance in the style of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, written in three parts, each with three cantos of heavily satirical verse, published 1662–80. With his framework of a Presbyterian knight Sir Hudibras and his sectarian squire Ralpho embarked on their quest, Butler poked lethal fun at the wide world of politics, theological dogma, scholasticism, alchemy, astrology and the supernatural.
‡ Laurence Hyde, 4th Earl of Rochester (1641–1711), was the second son of the great politician and historian the Earl of Clarendon. A royalist, he rose to power and influence at Charles II’s restoration and was made an earl in 1681, becoming lord high treasurer under his brother-in-law James II. His nieces became Queens Mary and Anne.
CHAPTER FOUR
Time nor Accidents Shall not Prevaile
I will write Every week, and noe misse of letters shall give us any doubts of one another, Time nor accidents shall not prevaile upon our hearts, and if God Almighty please to blesse us, wee will meet the same wee are, or happyer; I will doe all you bid mee, I will pray, and wish and hope, but you must doe soe too then; and bee soe carfull of your self that I may have nothing to reproche you with when you come back.
DOROTHY OSBORNE, letter to William Temple
[11/12 February 1654]
ALTHOUGH TRAVEL ABROAD was accepted as an important part of the education of a young English gentleman of the seventeenth century, a young unmarried lady was denied any such freedom; even travelling at home she was expected to be chaperoned at all times. For her to venture abroad to educate the mind was an almost inconceivable thought. But much more unsettling to the authority of the family, to her reputation and the whole social foundation of their lives was the idea that a young man and woman might meet outside the jurisdiction of their parents’ wishes, free to make their own connections, even to fall in love.
Not only were serendipitous meetings like that of Dorothy and William unorthodox for young people in their station of life, the idea that they themselves could choose whom they wanted to marry on the grounds of personal liking, even love, was considered a short cut to social anarchy, even lunacy. With universal constraints and expectations like this it was remarkable that they should ever have met, let alone discovered how much they really liked each other. Their candour in expressing their feelings in private also belied the carefulness of their public face. Dorothy admitted to William her eccentricity in this: ‘I am apt to speak what I think; and to you have soe accoustumed my self to discover all my heart, that I doe not beleeve twill ever bee in my power to conceal a thought from you.’1
The grip that family and society’s disapproval exerted was hard to shake off. In a later essay when he himself was old, William likened the denial of the heart to a kind of hardening of the arteries that too often accompanied old age: ‘youth naturally most inclined to the better passions; love, desire, ambition, joy,’ he wrote. ‘Age to the worst; avarice, grief, revenge, jealousy, envy, suspicion.’2
Dorothy had youth on her side and laid claim to all those better passions, but it was the unique and shattering effects of civil war that broke the constraints on her life and sprang her into the active universe of men. Although personally strong-minded and individualistic, her intent was always to comply with her family’s and society’s expectations, for she was an intellectual and reflective young woman and not a natural revolutionary. But for the war she would have been safely sequestered at home, visitors vetted by her family, her world narrowed to the view from a casement window. In fact this containment is what she had to return to, but for a while she was almost autonomous, a traveller across the sea – accompanied by a young brother, true, but he more inclined to play the daredevil than the careful chaperone.
As they both set off on their travels, heading on their different journeys towards the Isle of Wight, both Dorothy and William would have had all kinds of prejudice and practical advice ringing in their ears. Travel itself was fraught with danger: horses bolted, coaches regularly overturned, cut-throats ambushed the unwary and boats capsized in terrible seas. Disease and injury of the nastiest kinds were everyday risks with none of the basic palliatives of drugs for pain relief and penicillin for infection, or even a competent medical profession more likely to heal than to harm. The extent of the rule of law was limited and easily corrupted, and dark things happened under a foreign sun when the traveller’s fate would be known to no one.
As William Temple began his adventures for education and pleasure, Dorothy Osborne was propelled by very different circumstances into hers. Travel was hazardous, but it was considered particularly so if you were female. One problem was the necessity for a woman of keeping her public reputation spotless while inevitably attracting the male gaze, with all its hopeful delusions.
Lord Savile, in his Worldly Counsel to a Daughter, a more limited manual than Osborne’s Advice to a Son, was kindly and apologetic at the manifest unfairnesses of woman’s lot, yet careful not to encourage any daughter of his, or anyone else’s, to challenge the sacred status quo. He pointed out that innocent friendliness in a young woman might be misrepresented by both opportunistic men, full of vanity and desire, and women eager to make themselves appear more virtuous by slandering the virtue of their sisters, ‘therefore, nothing is with more care to be avoided than such a kind of civility as may be mistaken for invitation’. The onus was very much upon the young woman who had always to be polite while continually on guard lest her behaviour call forth misunderstanding and shame. She had to cultivate ‘a way of living that may prevent all coarse railleries or unmannerly freedoms; looks that forbid without rudeness, and oblige without invitation, or leaving room for the saucy inferences men’s vanity suggesteth to them upon the least encouragements’.3
Dorothy was often chided by William during their courtship for what he considered her excessive care for her good reputation and concern at what the world thought of her. With advice like this, it was little wonder that young women of good breeding felt that strict and suspicious eyes were ever upon them. A conscientious young woman’s behaviour and conversation had to be completely lacking in impetuousity and candour. It seemed humour also was a lurking danger. Gravity of demeanour at all times was the goal, for smiling too much (‘fools being always painted in that posture’) and – honour forbid – laughing out loud made even the moderate Lord Savile announce ‘few things are more offensive’.4 Certainly a woman was not meant to enjoy the society of anyone of the opposite sex except through the contrivance of family members, with a regard always to maintaining her honour and achieving an advantageous marriage.
After Dorothy and William’s fateful meeting on the Isle of Wight in 1648, they spent about a month together at St Malo, no doubt mostly chaperoned by Dorothy’s brother Robin, as travelling companions and explorers, both of the town and surrounding countryside, and more personally of their own new experiences and feelings. William would have met Sir Peter Osborne there, aged, unwell and in exile. Like the Temple family, the Osbornes were frank about their insistence that their children marry for money. Both Sir Peter Osborne and Sir John Temple were implacably set against any suggestion that Dorothy and William might wish to marry; rather it was a self-evident truth that their children had the more pressing duty to find a spouse with a healthy fortune to maintain the family’s social status and material security. For a short while neither father suspected the truth.
St Malo was an ancient walled city by the sea, at this time one of France’s most important ports. Yet it retained its defiant and indep
endent spirit as the base for much of the notorious piracy and smuggling carried on off its rocky and intricate coast. This black money brought great wealth to the town and financed the building of some magnificent houses. There was much to explore either within the walls in the twisting narrow alleyways or on the heather-covered cliffs that dropped to the boiling surf below.
These days of happy discovery were abruptly terminated when William’s father heard of his son’s delayed progress, and the alarming reason for it. When Sir John Temple ordered William to extricate himself from this young woman and her dispossessed family and continue his journey into France, there was no doubt that William, at twenty, would obey. The impact of this wrench from his newfound love can only be conjectured but he wrote, during the years of their enforced separation, something that implied resentment at parental power and a pained resignation to the habit of filial submission: ‘for the most part, parents of all people know their children the least, so constraind are wee in our demanours towards them by our respect, and an awfull sense of their arbitrary power over us, wch though first printed in us in our childish age, yet yeares of discretion seldome wholly weare out’. As a young man he thought no amount of kindness could overcome the traditional gulf between parents and their children (as parents themselves, he and Dorothy strove to overcome such traditions), but freedom and confidence thrived between friends, he believed, implying a close friend (i.e. a spouse) mattered as much as any blood relation: ‘for kindred are friends chosen to our hands’.5