by Jane Dunn
About three weeks later, Dorothy was in even greater need of William’s letters as she sat in vigil by her father’s bed, afraid he might be dying. Exhausted and strained, she vented her disappointment at the scrappy letter she had just received from him, exhorting him to start writing to her earlier instead of leaving it to the last minute. She was exasperated too with his petulant comment that she did not value his letters enough:
But harke you, if you think to scape with sending mee such bits of letters you are mistaken. You say you are often interupted and I believe you, but you must use then to begin to write before you receive mine, and hensoever you have any spare time allow mee some of it. Can you doubt that any thing can make your letters Cheap. In Earnest twas unkindly sayed, and if I could bee angry with you, it should bee for that. Noe Certainly they are, and ever will bee, deare to mee, as that which I receive a huge contentment by … O if you doe not send mee long letters then you are the Cruellest person that can bee. If you love mee you will and if you doe not I shall never love my self.53
Portraits were also necessary and affecting substitutes for the absent. They were painted and exchanged as important reminders of the loved one’s presence. Interestingly both Dorothy and William, neither of them rich or aristocratic, were to have portraits painted of themselves by some of the greatest artists of the day. In the summer of 1653 William was obviously missing her greatly and had asked for some memento: Dorothy suggested she get a miniature done of herself to send to William to console him in her absence. Nerves were obviously fraying: ‘For god sake doe not complaine soe that you doe not see mee, I beleeve I doe not suffer lesse in’t then you, but tis not to be helpt. If I had a Picture that were fitt for you, you should have it, I have but one that’s any thing like and that’s a great [full size] one, but I will send it some time or other to Cooper or Hoskins,* and have a litle one drawne by it, if I cannot bee in Towne to sitt my selfe.’54
As suitors came and went it was not just William and Dorothy who suffered. Dorothy’s brother Henry, the family member most assiduous about arranging a good marriage for her, many times came close to hysteria. He certainly subjected her to endless probing conversations, tearful reproaches, emotional blackmail and downright bullying in his attempts to undermine her adamant loyalty to William and antipathy to the candidates he steered her way. He once threatened with violence the messenger bringing the mail to Chicksands and periodically searched the house for evidence of letters from Dorothy’s forbidden lover: this accepted violation of her privacy was possibly the reason why only one of William’s letters from this period exists today, for it would seem Dorothy was forced to dispose of them once she had read them. On one occasion she wrote to William that she was unwilling to destroy the letter she had just received: ‘You must pardon mee I could not burn your other letter for my life, I was soe pleased to see I had soe much to reade, & soe sorry I had don soe soone, that I resolved to begin them again and had like to have lost my dinner by it.’55
If in fact Dorothy felt compelled to destroy each of William’s longed-for letters it would have caused great anguish, for they were largely her only contact with him and had an iconic power. The emotional journey they described was the most important of her life and, as her co-conspirator, his was the only reassuring voice in a chorus of ignorance and hostility. For all she knew, their clandestine letters might have been all they would ever have to show for these years of heightened feeling, should their love story end the way the world expected.
Certainly Henry Osborne’s relationship with his sister was peculiarly intense, as Dorothy realised herself. They lived together with their father at Chicksands and Henry was much more controlling and intrusive in his sister’s life than her older brother John, who had married and moved away, only complaining occasionally at her fussiness over the suitors on offer. Henry and Dorothy clashed not only over the knotty marriage question but on a deeper level they differed about priorities in life and relationships in general. A typical argument ensued after a visit to a rich local widow, Lady Briers, whose ‘Old Miserable husband’ had died the previous month and who, despite her age and plainness, ‘is Courted a thousand times more then the greatest beauty in the world would bee that had not a fortune’. The following evening, when Dorothy’s and Henry’s thoughts were still full of the previous night’s entertainment, ‘my Brother and I fell into dispute about riches, and the great advantages of it, hee instanced in the widdow, that it made one respected in the world. I sayed twas true, but that was a respect I should not at all value when I owed it only to my fortune, & wee debated it soe long till wee had both talked our selv’s weary enough to goe to bed.’56
This of course was the basis for the Temple and Osborne families’ opposition to William and Dorothy’s betrothal. Conversations always returned to the irrefutable family argument she related wearily to William: both of them were estimable enough as individuals, ‘but your fortune and mine, can never agree, and in plaine term’s wee forfait our discretions [sound judgement] and run willfully upon our owne ruin’s, if there bee such a thought’.57
Not only did Henry have an exclusively mercenary approach to marriage, he had a jaundiced view of human relations in general. He consistently lectured Dorothy that she was naive to think that love could be constant, pointing out how frequently people appear to marry with passion only to find love quickly slip away. Dorothy thought it a matter of temperament and, with her own reservations based on the unhappy marriages she knew, she battled to maintain her and William’s idealism against her brother’s cynicism: ‘I cannot bee of his opinion (though I confesse there are too many Examples on’t) I have always’s beleeved there might bee a friendship perfect like that you describe,’ she wrote to William, ‘and mee thinks I finde something like that in my selfe, but sure tis not to be taught, it must come Naturaly to those that have it, and those that have it not can ne’ere bee made to understand it.’58
Marriage was a constant preoccupation, not only the hopes for their own and the frustrations that ensued, but also the suitors pressed on them by family, the examples set by others and, always interesting to them, their own philosophical discussions of what kind of relationship they thought it should be.
In one of his later essays, William put in a passionate plea for love as the motive force in marriage. He deplored the current financial imperative that undervalued everything else: ‘these [marriage] contracts would never be made, but by mens avarice, and greediness of portions [dowries] with the women they marry, which is grown among us to that degree, as to surmount and extinguish all other regards or desires: so that our marriages are made, just like other common bargains and sales, by the meer consideration of interest or gain, without any love or esteem, of birth or of beauty itself, which ought to be the true ingredients of all happy compositions of this kind.’
He argued that not only was the mercenary aspect of marriage responsible for increasing the sum of human misery but, in the new spirit of scientific experiment and debate, he claimed that it also diminished the health and intelligence of the children born of these unnatural and loveless unions: ‘The weakness of children, both in their bodies and minds, proceeds not only from such constitutions or qualities in the parents, but also from the ill consequences upon generation, by marriages contracted without affection, choice, or inclination, (which is allowed by naturalists upon reason as well as experience).’59
This was a surprising claim. Perhaps he was thinking about the properties of attraction and repulsion as explored in recent experiments in magnetism* that had excited speculation and debate. Was William himself speculating that men and women ignored these natural energies of attraction at their peril, and the peril of their unborn children?
As a young woman, at least while she had her reputation (and therefore marriage prospects) to protect, Dorothy Osborne was less radical in her views. She certainly disagreed with the ‘doctrine that is often preached, which is, that though at first sight one has noe kindenesse for them [the b
etrothed in an arranged marriage] yet it will grow strangly after marriage’. From a personal perspective, feelings were important to her in the transaction: she had little trust in familiarity transforming antipathy into love: ‘I easily beleeve that to marry one for whome wee have already some affection, will infinitely Encrease that kindeness yet I shall never bee perswaded that Marriage has a Charme to raise love out of nothing, much lesse out of dislike.’60
However, when it came to contemplating her place in society and the way her actions might be interpreted and her character dissected, she was much more ambivalent. Explaining herself to the more impetuous William, she wrote of how the world thought love matches debased both parties by revealing the woman as a flibbertigibbet and the man as a fool: ‘Whosoever marry’s without any consideration of fortune shall never bee allowed to doe it out of soe reasonable an aprehension [as preferring the person to the money]; the whole worlde (without any reserve) shall pronounce they did it meerly to sattisfie theire Giddy humor … In Earnest I beleeve twould bee an injury to you, I doe not see that it putts any Valew upon men, when Women marry them for Love (as they terme it), ’tis not theire merritt but our ffolly that is always’s presumed to cause it.’61
Dorothy was not being particularly priggish or blindly conformable in her priorities and concerns. Another contemporary, Lady Halkett, whose impoverished royalist family was of similar standing to Dorothy’s own, wrote in her memoir: ‘I ever looked upon marying withoutt consentt of parentts as the highest act of ingratitude and disobedience that chilldren could committ, and I resolved never to bee guilty of itt.’62 And this was from a highly intelligent, spirited and ingenious young woman who had just worked out that the way she could reconcile her own conscience with her need to attend to a desperate young suitor, before he was banished abroad, was to meet him, but with her eyes blindfold. In this way, she thought she could not be accused of breaking a promise to her dragon of a mother that she would never see him again.
Unlike Dorothy’s experience, however, Lady Halkett’s young man, Thomas Howard, heir to Lord Howard of Escrick, did not keep faith during their enforced separation but married instead the daughter of an earl. When she learned of this betrayal, she threw herself on to her bed and cried, ‘Is this the man for whom I have sufred so much? Since hee hath made himselfe unworthy [of] my love, hee is unworthy my anger or concerne.’63 Lady Halkett admitted her mother’s malicious laughter at the news, and the imagined laughter of others, troubled her most and she tried to salvage her pride by saying Howard was more damaged by his behaviour than she was. Just once she slipped from the moral high ground and expressed the jilted lover’s ageless desire for retribution: ‘I pray God hee may never dye in peace till hee confese his fault and aske mee forgivenese’, but immediately begged God’s pardon. Her maid Miriam was less concerned with pious charity and, lifting her hands to heaven, prayed that the new wife be visited with ‘dry breasts and a miscarying wombe’,64 a curse that seemed to be answered by Howard’s continued childlessness, despite marriage to two wives.
Like all these young women, Dorothy took particular care ‘in avoyding the talk of the world’,65 but it is that world that made William and Dorothy who they were and provided the resistance over which they triumphed. They respected the cultural and family demands on them and so only a belief that their love was extraordinary and outside the usual bounds of experience could justify their defiance and keep their faith alive for nearly seven years.
In fact, the thought that she and William shared a rare and precious understanding was very important to Dorothy and she was particularly moved by a section in a poem by the metaphysical poet Abraham Cowley,* Davideis, an unfinished epic on the life of the young David. She sent the verses to William to read, describing them as ‘a paraphrase upon the friendships of David and Jonathan, tis I think the best I have seen of his and I like the subject because tis that I would bee perfect In[.] Adieu Je suis vostre [I am yours].’66
This ineffable quality in love was what she wanted to share with him: ‘tis that I would bee perfect In’.
What art, thou, love, thou great mysterious thing?
From what hid stock does thy strange nature spring?
’Tis thou that mob’st the world though ev’ry part,
And hold’st the vast frame close that nothing start
From the due place and office first ordained,
By thee were all things made and are sustained.
Sometimes wee see thee fully and can say
From hence thou took’st thy rise and went’st thy way,
But oft’ner the short beams of reason’s eye
See only there thou art, not how, nor why.
Cowley’s interest in scientific experiment at the time also made it possible he was likening love to a force of nature, like magnetism that had been defined scientifically for the first time at the beginning of the century. This might have added an extra interest to Dorothy’s appreciation of the poem, for it was very possible that she had discussed with William his interest in relating magnetism to human attraction.
Any claims of an irresistible attraction between Dorothy and William were lost on her brother Henry. He was nine years older than her and still unmarried himself when he became obsessed with marrying her to anyone other than William Temple. In his diary at the time he used a code to obscure the passages where he mentioned Dorothy and her suitors, emphasising how much the subject mattered to him and the depth and secrecy of his feelings. In fact Henry never did marry and this could explain something of his emotional intensity and his stated fear that she might marry someone she loved more than him.
When Dorothy’s father died both she and Henry would be obliged to move out of Chicksands to make way for the heir, their eldest brother Sir John, and his family. Henry wanted to move in with Dorothy, even should she marry: ‘many times [he] wishes mee a husband that loved mee as well as he do’s, (though hee seems’s to doubt the possibility ont) but never desyr’s that I should love that husband with any Passion, and plainly tells mee soe.’ His own misplaced passion caused her to comment on it both to her brother himself and to William, to whom she wrote: ‘but Seriously I many times receive letters from him that were they seen without an addresse to mee, or his Name, noe body would believe they were from a brother, & I cannot but tell him somtimes that sure hee mistakes and sends letters that were meant to his Mistresse, till hee swear’s to mee that hee has none.’67
Dorothy obviously found Henry’s possessiveness towards her had more of the jealous lover than the loving brother about it for, in a later letter, she referred to how his suspicions about William reminded her of a cuckolded husband afraid of facing the truth. This lack of any female love interest in his own life (by the date of that letter of Dorothy’s, Henry was thirty-five years old) was significant. His sister was aware that there was a prurience and vicariousness perhaps in Henry’s selection of suitors for her, some of whom she recognised might have been preferable in his own eyes for himself. In the early summer of 1653, Dorothy told William of her brother’s latest roundup of likely lovers for her and mentioned one of them who, although having barely a better fortune to offer than William, seemed peculiarly attractive to Henry: ‘one above all the rest I think hee is in love with himself and may marry him too, if hee pleases, I shall not hinder him, tis one Talbott; the finest gentleman hee has seen this seven yeer, but the mischeif on’t is hee has not above fifteen or 16 hundred pound a year, though hee [Henry] swear’s hee begins to think one might bate [deduct] £500 a yeer for such a husband’.68
Henry’s possible homosexuality may well have contributed to the strained and emotionally volatile atmosphere Dorothy had to endure at home. Homosexuality in the mid-seventeenth century was considered a scandalous sin against God and a civil offence punishable by death.* Unable to express his emotional and sexual nature, Henry instead focused all his passions on his sister and his energies on thwarting her love affair with William that he found so threatening. Hence his ob
session with marrying her to a man of whom he approved but also someone who would never replace him, he hoped, in Dorothy’s affections. His determination to control her continued even after Dorothy and William’s marriage, when he initially refused to pay her dowry and forced his sister and detested brother-in-law to resort to the law.
There was no doubt that Dorothy felt trapped by the expectations of her family and society, and yet she did not actively wish to break the accepted filial contract. There was a real sense of her solitariness at Chicksands, and the lack of solidarity for her within the family, now that she was the last remaining woman. Sisters and daughters were expected to be subservient to fathers and brothers. The Church and society considered women less capable of rational thought or good judgement, and most women themselves accepted this opinion of their sex. There was a general belief in the constitutional inferiority of women’s intellects, their brains somehow made of softer, moister, colder material. Yet in individual lives and in private it was clearly evident that many women were more than equal intellectually to most men. It was just that they were not encouraged to trumpet it abroad. This was the taboo the Duchess of Newcastle flouted. Having been viciously attacked for her temerity in pursuing her literary ambitions, she refused to keep quiet. It was not nature but lack of nurture and encouragement, she explained in the preface to her Philosophical Opinions, together with men’s fear of losing the upper hand, that held back women’s development and made the prejudice against them true.