Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  By the time Dorothy consulted Lilly, the astrologer was at the height of his authority, having been used during the civil wars to encourage the parliamentarian armies with his prognostications of victory. His prediction of their overwhelming rout of the royalists at Naseby established his reputation for good. His value as a propagandist was not lost on the parliamentarian high command, although there is no reason to believe that Cromwell looked to the stars for justification, with God already so firmly on his side. However Lilly and his royalist opposite number, George Wharton, traded insults and partisan predictions throughout the civil wars, publicised in their various pamphlets and almanacs. When Wharton was imprisoned at the end of the war and threatened with death, Lilly intervened to save his life to bring a just conclusion to their sidereal combat.

  There were failures of divination alongside his triumphs, but one of Lilly’s most notable successes since Naseby was his prediction in 1652 (only recognised as such fourteen years after the event) of the Great Fire of London in the form of a coded drawing or ‘hieroglyphic’.* A month after the fire in 1666 he was summoned to appear before the committee formed to investigate the causes of this disaster but was able to argue that although he had predicted the Great Fire his timing could not have been precise. More crucially, he refuted absolutely the claim that he started the fire in order to enhance an already high reputation for prescience and accuracy. He was dismissed without charge.

  In fact it was his other predictions during that dire year of 1652 that caused the most consternation. The first unhappy configuration was the lunar eclipse on 15 March followed closely by the solar eclipse on the 29th. This proximity was bad enough, for it increased the malefic influence of the eclipses, but the fact that they both occurred in Aries, the astrological sign ruled by Mars the god of war, was a cosmic harbinger that could not be ignored. Lilly predicted strife with the Scots and Dutch. The first was a pretty safe bet but the second was more interesting: ‘I very much fear a War, or some Warlike attempts by sea or land doe follow.’ More personally, he warned that this double eclipse in Aries would mean difficulties between friends, followed, it seemed, by death.

  John Evelyn,† a man of a more sceptical frame of mind than most of the populace, noted both eclipses in his diary and the crippling effects these prognostications had on the people of London, at least: ‘Was that celebrated Eclipse of the Sun, so much threatned by the Astrologers, & had so exceedingly alarm’d the whole Nation, so as hardly any would worke, none stir out of their houses; so ridiculously were they abused by knavish and ignorant star-gazers.’3

  Perhaps significantly, he was writing his diary up later after the first two eclipses had failed to destroy civil society and it was therefore easier to be more scornful than he might have been at the time. In fact, the first Anglo-Dutch war broke out only three months later and, just after the second lunar eclipse on 7 September 1652, the English and Dutch navies first met in the Battle of Kentish Knock. This time the English were victorious but before the year was out they were to lose to the Dutch at Dungeness. Naval battles continued spasmodically for the next two years with the English navy finally gaining the upper hand. This was considered another success for Mr Lilly, despite what Evelyn, or indeed Dorothy Osborne, might have thought of the rational basis for his predictions.

  Trouble and strife were also very clearly evident closer to home in the domestic political scene. The impatient army was opposed to an unaccountable parliament, the still sitting remnant of the Rump Parliament, reluctant to accept an early dissolution. Only Oliver Cromwell appeared statesmanlike enough to broker some kind of resolution. The Venetian ambassador at the time considered him ‘a man of great foresight, of a lofty spirit, and capable whatever happens of parrying blows directed against himself, and of retaining the affection and esteem of both parties’.4 Affection may have been putting it a little strong, but respect there certainly was. His attempts at resolving the standoff, however, did not work and the uneasiness and conflict of ideals continued into the new year of 1653. Parliament’s tenacious grip on power concerned Cromwell too, who feared that the freedom and reforms for which he and others had struggled so bitterly might now be dissipated by people who had not shared their ideals in the first place or paid the exacting price.

  When on 20 April Cromwell heard that parliament intended to rush through the disputed Bill of Elections, he entered the Commons, ‘clad in plain black clothes, with gray worsted trousers’ and his big black hat. He sat for a while listening to the debate and then, unable to contain himself any longer, rose, took off his hat, and started speaking, temperately enough at first. Suddenly outrage at what he perceived as double-dealing, and contempt for the majority of members in the House, got the better of him: putting his hat back on his head he left his place and strode up and down the aisle haranguing them for their iniquities as drunkards and whoremasters. Then with the help of twenty to thirty musketeers he had summoned he cleared the crowded chamber of its startled members and forcibly dissolved parliament. Pointing to the mace, symbol of the speaker’s authority, Cromwell could barely disguise his disdain: ‘What shall we do with this bauble?’ he blurted out. ‘Here, take it away.’5

  It was an electrifying moment in parliamentary history yet it provoked no answering violence or protest, although the taverns were agog with the gossip and more polite society amazed at Cromwell’s presumption. Even Dorothy, isolated in the family mansion in deepest country and struggling to care for her father, responded with ambivalent shock at the news. She was keen to discuss its import with William and also to tease him about how, if she had deigned to become Mrs Henry Cromwell, her status would have risen along with her father-in-law’s:

  But blesse mee what will become of us all now, is this not a strange turne. What do’s my Lord L[isle?].* Sure this will at least deffer your Journy. Tell mee what I must think on’t, whither it bee better or worse or whither you are all concern’d in it, for if you are not I am not, onely if I had bin soe wise as to have taken hold of the offer was made mee of H[enry] C[romwell], I might have bin in a faire way of prefferment for sure they will bee greater now than Ever. Is it true that Al[gernon] S[idney] was so unwilling to leave the house, that the G[overnor (Cromwell)] was faine to take the Pain’s to turne him out himself. Well tis a pleasant world this, if Mr Pim were alive again I wonder what hee would think of these proceedings and whither this would apeare as great a breach of the Privilidge of Parliament as the demanding of the 5 members. But I shall talk treason by and by if I doe not look to my self, tis saffer talking of the Oringe flower water you sent mee.6

  Dorothy was making an interesting political and legal point. The Mr Pim she referred to was the leading parliamentarian John Pym, who had died ten years before. He had been leader of the House of Commons in the years prior to the civil wars and was the mouthpiece for many of the grievances parliament had against Charles I’s autocratic rule. Pym was one of the five members of parliament, referred to by Dorothy, whom Charles I had tried to arrest in 1642, in the process revealing his contempt for parliamentary privilege – an outrage that further united the Commons and even the Lords against him. Dorothy was suggesting quite reasonably that Cromwell had flouted parliamentary privilege just as blatantly as had Charles I. It was clear that her political sympathies were royalist and yet she seemed to have nothing but warm feelings personally for Henry Cromwell – and even for his father, messianic reformer, republican and regicide as he was – and would have been happy to have married into their family if she had not already met William Temple and promised her heart to him.

  It was not only the politics of the day that Dorothy discussed with William during these last two years of their frustratingly long courtship; she also debated the nature of friendship and marriage, and the way one best conducted oneself in the world. Pressing French romances on him, she begged him to read them so she could discuss the characters with him with as much interest and insight as if they were real. They provided simplistic, unchanging archety
pes when Dorothy’s real world was in flux. The interregnum years, absent of monarch, royal court and bishops, was a period of social change and insecurity. The Puritan revolution, although primarily a political and religious movement and only a temporary one, shook the foundations of every stratum of society. There was a lasting legacy too, for when the monarchy was restored in 1660, the political, religious and social life of the nation was altered for ever from its pre-war state.

  With the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, the hereditary leaders, if not dead, were exiled or impoverished and disempowered. By early 1654, Cromwell had stepped into the breach as lord protector and established a kind of court around him but his ingrained self-doubt and personal modesty meant there was a lack of confidence throughout this new hierarchy. The uncertainty extended to all levels of society.

  In one of her conversational letters to William, Dorothy, herself only about twenty-six years old, showed her intelligence and generosity of spirit in her analysis of the recent breakdown in civility in the manners of the young: ‘Tis strange to see the folly that possesses the young People of this Age, and the libertys they take to themselv’s; I have the Charrity to beleeve they apear very much worse then they are, and that the want of a Court to govern themselv’s by is in great part the cause of theire Ruine. Though that was noe perfect scoole of Vertue yet Vice there wore her maske, and apeared soe unlike her self that she gave noe scandall.’

  Dorothy obviously thought a little hypocrisy among those in authority (and the royal courts had provided ample examples of this) never went amiss if it helped maintain an outward show of courtesy and moral rectitude to encourage the young and impressionable into behaving well. She also felt that few were disciplined enough to act virtuously without the direction and reckoning of others of higher status whose opinions they valued:

  Such as were realy as discreet as they seem’d to bee; gave good Example, and the Eminency of theire condition made others strive to imitate them, or at least they durst not owne a contreary Course … but sure it is not safe to take all the liberty is allowed us, there are not many that are sober enough to bee trusted with the government of themselv’s, and because others Judge us with more severity then our indulgence to ourselv’s will permitt, it must necessarily ffollow that tis saffer being ruled by theire opinion then by our owne.7

  William’s naturally naive, expressive nature gave him a more optimistic view of the world and humankind in general, outlined in one of his interesting early essays probably included in the parcel of his romances he sent to Dorothy to read: ‘Propension rather to good then evill is as naturall to mans mind (I meane that wch it esteems good and evill) as descent is to heavy bodyes or ascent to light; ne[ver is] there any one that where they both beare the same price of honor and profit would not preferr peace before warr, security before danger.’8

  William’s sister thought these essays extraordinary given his youth, ‘such a spirit & range of fancy & imagination, I beleeve, has seldome bin seen’.9 The same essay reveals his creative and imaginative mind, filled with curiosity at the world and the ability to make original, often eloquent connections that threw a new light on the subjects under his gaze. Here is how he described his own thought processes:

  my thoughts … take such ayery pathes and are soe light themselves … caused by a meslée of severall passions wherof none is strong enough entirely to gaine the field and none soe weake as to quit it … but this I speake of is a crowd of restless capering antique fancyes, bounding heere and there, fixing noe where, building in one halfe houre castles in Ireland, monasteryes in France, palaces in Virginia, dancing at a wedding, weeping at a buriall, inthron’d like a King, inragg’d like a beggar, a lover, a freind, an indifferent person and sometimes thinges of as little relation one to another as the greate Turke and a redd herring, to say the truth tis at least a paineless posture of mind if not something more, and why not?10

  William later recognised this access of imagination, volatile feeling and dreamy speculation as being at odds with his professional life as an ambassador and public figure, expected to be cool, pragmatic and resolutely single-minded. He had to battle with his natural delight in seeing the world in all its hues rather than strictly black and white, a propensity ‘he us’d to say cost him afterwards so much pains to suppress in all he writt & made publick’.11

  Having never been particularly dogmatic in his religious belief or practice, William may have been less concerned than Dorothy at the post-war breakdown of traditions and conventions of behaviour in all walks of life. Many people, however, struggling with what seemed to be more of a free-for-all in those years of the mid-seventeenth century, particularly mourned the old certainties of religious devotion. In the churches the lack of figures of authority to deliver sermons meant every firebrand or religious bore thought he had a right to preach. John Evelyn noted with disapproval: ‘It is now a rare thing to find a priest of the Church of England in a parish pulpit, most of which were filled with Independents and Phanatics.’12 He amplified this thought in his satirical account A Character of England: ‘the apprehension of Popery, or fondness to their own imaginations, having carried them so far to the other extream, that they have now lost all moderation and decorum … few take notice of the Lord’s Prayer; it is esteemed a kind of weakness to use it, but the Creed and the Decalogue [Ten Commandments] are not once heard in their congregations: this is milke for babes, and they are all giants.’13

  Both Dorothy and William had separately attended a service conducted by one of these radical preachers, the Anabaptist William Erbury,* in the early summer of 1653. Dorothy had approached the event with some reservations but as she explained, ‘I was assured it was too late to goe any whither else, and believ’d it better to heare an ill Sermon than none.’ Apparently the preacher’s sermon involved some dire predictions accompanied by the noisy collapse of a choir stall and this, Dorothy wrote to William, ‘did a little discompose my Gravity’. She thought she could make a better sermon with her own speculative musings on the frustration of one’s desires in this earthly life (something they were both finding increasingly hard to bear) and the possibility that this made heaven appear all the more appealing. She had to stop preaching, she wrote, ‘least you should think I have as many wormes in my head as hee’.14

  This disruption of traditional social and religious hierarchies had an effect in the home in terms of relations between husband and wife, parents and children. It was customary for children of the gentry and aristocracy, when first greeting their parents each day, to kneel before them and ask for their blessing. Lord Clarendon,* the great royalist historian and politician, deplored the loss of this symbolic courtesy and what seemed to him a general breakdown of parental authority and good manners. Children, he grumbled, ‘asked not blessing of their parents … The young women conversed without any circumspection or modesty, and frequently met at taverns and common eating houses … The daughters of noble and illustrious families bestowed themselves upon the divines of the time or other low and unequal matches. Parents had no manner of authority over their children, nor children any obedience or submission to their parents.’15

  Clarendon was closer to Dorothy’s and William’s fathers’ generation and he was complaining about the generation slightly younger than they were. Exaggerating to make a point of how civil war had fractured the social fabric of the country, he was nevertheless correct in that everything had changed, and the pieces would not fit back together again even with the restoration of monarchy, together with a fully active court, bishops and religious ritual. But as the new generation sampled the uneven freedoms of these interregnum years, there seemed to be no loosening of the parental shackles in the Osborne and Temple households.

  The restraints lay particularly hard on Dorothy. From the end of April 1653 for nearly a year until his death, her father was almost continually bedridden and she his companion and carer, along with their servants. Since her mother’s death, the running of the household, t
he management of social activities, limited as they were, and responsibility for her father’s health and comfort fell to her. It was an onerous duty but one she did not question. He was to her always ‘the best Father in the worlde’16 and she was grateful for the benevolence and kindness he extended to everyone but particularly to her, his only surviving daughter. His long journey towards death began with ‘an Ague’ that spring, probably the periodic malaria that so many suffered, with fits of shivering and cold alternating with sweating fever. Dorothy thought he would not survive this attack: he was so weak he fainted on rising from his bed when they remade it.

  The strain of caring for him began to show as she wrote to William: ‘You ought in Charity to write as much as you can for in Earnest my life heer since my Fathers sicknesse, is soe sad, that to another humor then mine it would bee unsuportable, but I have bin soe used to misfortun’s that I cannot bee much surprised with them, though perhaps I am as sencible as another.’17

  William obviously wrote back in some alarm over either the state of her mind or health, for she was quick to reassure him, realising from his diary he had sent her to read that he suffered from periodic depression too – a discovery that dismayed her, as she had hoped that low spirits were her bane alone: ‘’twas the only thing I ever desyr’d wee might differ in and (therfore) I think it is denyde mee’. She then undermined her reassurance by telling him she had barely been able to sit up in order to write to him as she too had gone down with the ague: ‘But you must not bee troubled at this, that’s the way to kill mee indeed.’ She also added that her eldest brother John and the itinerant old bore ‘Cousen Molle’* had descended on Chicksands and they were full of officious advice as to how best to treat her illness: ‘I am neither to eate drink nor sleep without their leave.’ She hastily ended her letter and addressed it: ‘For Mrs Painter at her house in Bedford Street next the Goate in Coven Garden’,*18 so William could collect it without attracting any suspicious attention from his family.