Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  William was passing the time rather aimlessly in London. Playing tennis, a particularly fashionable sport at the time, and visiting friends when he was not pondering on his frustrated passion for Dorothy, he waited impatiently for her letters and replied by return. His spirited nature made it harder for him to endure their enforced absences from each other and the utter uncertainty of outcome. Judging by Dorothy’s responses, there were times when his confidence in her love for him evaporated and he read into her letters upsetting signs of disengagement. Although we can only surmise the tenor of his side of the correspondence at this point, she did seem to be more sure of their relationship and to have the upper hand. Claiming that she had a melancholy turn of mind, Dorothy’s letters nevertheless showed a seriousness and sharp sense of reality in a young woman who had learned some harsh lessons from life. Despite suffering setbacks and frustrations, she remained throughout stable, sane and highly amused by the foibles of her world. Her letters also showed her confidence in William’s feelings for her. In the early summer of 1653, she started a letter to him flirtatiously in response to his own teasing:

  Sir

  I have bin reckoning up how many faults you lay to my Charge in your last letter, and I finde I am severe, unjust, unmercifull, and unkinde; O mee how should one doe to mende all these, ’tis work for an Age and tis to bee feared I shall bee Old before I am good.19

  William was not only writing provocative letters to Dorothy, he was also practising writing essays in the style of Montaigne and developing his philosophies on love and how best to live well. Montaigne prided himself on writing essays that were more like conversations with friends. Casually digressive, unashamedly personal and libertarian, his writings were effortlessly fluent without appearing to strive for effect. He was tremendously influential philosophically and stylistically and it is easy to see why he appealed so much to the young William, intent on finding his own style and ethos in the world.

  William’s father, Sir John Temple, was also at home in London, remarkable in still having refused to remarry after the loss of his much loved wife, fifteen years before. He had enjoyed no public office since he had been purged from the Long Parliament in December 1648 and his energies were focused for a while on his family. That spring Sir John was eager for his highly personable eldest son to marry an heiress he had found for him. He had little patience with William’s obsessive interest in the unsuitable, inadequately endowed Osborne girl. ‘Pray for my sake bee a very Obedient Sonne,’ Dorothy wrote to William, showing her confidence that in this at least he would not comply, ‘all your fault’s will bee layde to my Charge else, and alas I have too many of my owne.’20 Although William was willing, like her, to refuse the prospective suitors offered by the family, he nevertheless had little desire positively to disobey his father and marry against his wishes, not least because it would mean he and Dorothy and their children struggling without financial support from either family, with loss of social status, chance of preferment and of gainful employment in government or at court.

  Knowing the pressure William was under, Dorothy wrote: ‘I shall hate my selfe as Longe as I live if I cause any disorder between your father and you, but if my name can doe you any service, I shall not scruple to trust you with that, since I make none to trust you with my heart.’21 While appearing to remove herself from the decision, she nevertheless in that quiet phrase was reiterating her powerful position as his promised love.

  As the situations of both Osborne and Temple fathers were changing so too the obstacles to their children’s happiness were in flux. Sir John Temple at last had employment again. But it came as a result of four years of dangerous and brutal suppression and dispossession of the Irish by Cromwell and his commanders. Only by 1653 was the country subdued enough for the next stage of land allotment to be attempted. In the November of that year, Sir John Temple’s experience in Ireland led to his appointment as commissioner ‘to consider and advise from time to time how the titles of the Irish and others to any estate in Ireland, and likewise their delinquency according to their respective qualifications, might be put in the most speedy and exact way of adjudication consistent with justice’.22

  A judicial process was established to distinguish those Irish implicated in the rebellion or in support of the royalist cause from those innocent of such associations, so that only the latter should be allotted land in one-third of the country, the more barren western regions. The rest of Ireland was appropriated for settlement by the English, soldiers who had fought on the parliamentarian side as well as ‘adventurers’, the investors who had lent money to raise the army. This parcelling up of Irish land, rewarding those, mostly Protestant, who had fought on the victors’ side by dispossessing the largely Catholic families who had supported the king, was to have catastrophic and wide-ranging effects lasting right to the present day.

  Difficult and distressing as this administration must have been for him, Sir John Temple had experienced first-hand the bloody rebellion of 1641 and had seen and documented reports of the massacres of the Protestant settlers, which had resulted in his incendiary book on the rebellion. He considered the rebel Irish wild, alien, ungovernable, and so may well have been more emotionally detached from the appalling human plight of those he came across, deprived of their land and livelihoods, many families homeless and facing starvation. His commission lasted a year, mostly spent in Ireland. The demanding nature of this work inevitably took some of the pressure off his son: Sir John’s mind and energies were fully exercised on his difficult and still dangerous mission and the romantic concerns of his family and the problem of potential daughters-in-law could only seem less pressing. In his father’s absence, William was free.

  Dorothy’s father was facing a different challenge as, increasingly weakened by illness and age, he and his family prepared for his death. As she sat beside his bed, Dorothy was certain she would never act against his wishes: ‘tis my duty from which nothing can ever tempt mee’,23 but she also knew that he would not live for much longer and she was determined that her filial obedience would end with his death, as would her brother Henry’s power over her. She gave a vivid picture to William of her night-long vigil as the old cavalier slept, while she shared a bottle of ale with his servant and a maid who kept watch beside her:

  I have had soe little sleep since my father was sick that I am never thoroughly awake. Lord how I have wisht for you, heer doe I sit all night by a Poore moaped [stupefied] fellow that serv’s my father, and have much adoe to keep him awake and my self too, if you heard the wise discourse that is between us, you would sweare we wanted sleep … My fellow watchers have bin a sleep too till just now, they begin to stretch and yawne, they are goeing to try if eating and drinking can keep them awake and I am kindly invited to bee of theire company. My fathers man has gott one of the mayd’s to talk nonsense to to night and they have gott between them a botle of Ale, I shall loose my share if I doe not take them at theire first offer.24

  A quick draught from the communal ale bottle temporarily revived her enough to finish her letter with an urgent request to William to send her a copy of Lady Newcastle’s poems, just recently published and causing a stir. Dorothy was obviously intrigued, for here was a woman, only five years older than she was, flouting all convention and publishing under her own name. It was the first time an aristocratic woman had chosen to publish her work openly since Lady Mary Wroth* was virulently attacked for publishing her romance Urania in 1621 with too readily identified lovers and libertines. Recognising himself as one of these disreputable characters, Sir Edmund Denny’s riposte to what he considered a slander of his family’s name was to denounce Wroth as a hermaphrodite whose actions made her monstrous in the world’s eyes. Although it happened three decades before, the destruction of her reputation and career at court was long remembered and mentioned again in Lady Newcastle’s series of self-justificatory prefaces to Poems and Fancies.

  Lady Newcastle had already been the subject of much gossip and specula
tion over the extravagance of her dress and her larger than life character. Dorothy was not only fascinated to see this phenomenon expressing herself in print, she was also amazed at her ladyship’s foolhardiness. Although she sharply dismissed publication as folly, in comparing herself to the author, Dorothy perhaps revealed her own secret hope that she too was a writer: ‘for God sake if you meet with [the book] send it mee, they say tis ten times more Extravagant then her dresse. Sure the poore woman is a little distracted she could never bee soe rediculous else as to venture at writeing book’s and in verse too, If I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that.’25

  People had already told Dorothy how remarkably good her letters were. William had said ‘that I write better then the most Extreordinary person in the Kingdom’.26 The vignettes in her letters showed her skill at teasing out the foibles of human nature and, with striking candour and supple use of language, her ability to capture the essential truth of things; like her aside in a fascinating disquisition on modern marriage that to have a husband who was indifferent to her or to marry a man she did not love ‘twould break my heart sooner then make mee shed a tear, ’tis ordinary greifs that only make mee weep’.27

  Society assumed a woman would find all her fulfilment in the domestic and social arts, friendships and eventually marriage and motherhood being the sum of her expectations. Subtle and clever as she was, Dorothy knew there was more to her gifts than just a genteel facility with the pen, but she was afraid even to imagine herself a public writer acknowledged by others. It was disconcerting to see another more courageous or reckless woman than herself break rank and plunge into this forbidden world of publishing and self-promotion. It was understandable therefore, that when Dorothy had finally read Lady Newcastle’s subversive book, she should join the chorus of disparagement and rejection: the author of these poems was obviously mad and her friends should have prevented her from making such a fool of herself.

  The civil wars and the Puritan revolution had broken old taboos and instituted new ones. Censorship was loosened and free speech flourished. Certainly more women had begun to write journals, poetry and memoirs as well as the religious and political tracts published as useful improving texts. Women’s personal and more literary efforts were written largely for private pleasure and if they were shown to anyone then they were copied by hand and modestly circulated among a close circle of family and friends. Even this was considered rather bold, threatening to transgress the prescribed feminine virtues of silence, obedience and humility. For a woman to presume she had any personal point of view worth broadcasting to a wider public was unnatural and rather alarming. Thomas Parker, a Calvinist minister, sent this harsh judgement to his writer sister: ‘Your printing of a book, beyond the custom of your sex, doth rankly smell.’28

  To a young woman of diminished fortune like Dorothy, for whom a good marriage was the only gateway to a wider world, reputation was a precious commodity, ‘Almost of Absolute Necessity’ she would say. Lady Newcastle’s situation was much more secure than Dorothy’s: by the time she took her revolutionary step, she had already captured her earl, William Cavendish, a man of great wealth and influence, later to be further elevated as the Duke of Newcastle. He was an admiring and fond husband who not only protected her with his status and fortune but also actively supported her publishing ambitions. Dorothy, again comparing herself to the literary duchess, explained to her William why she could not be oblivious to the judgement of others, as he hoped, pointing out smartly that even Lady Newcastle was susceptible to public opinion: ‘I never knew any soe sattisfied with theire owne innocence as to be content the worlde should think them Guilty; some out of pride have seem’d to contemme ill reports when they have founde they could not avoyde them; but none out of strength of reason though many have prettended to it; noe not my Lady New Castle with all her Philosophy*; therefore you must not Expect it from mee.’29

  Dorothy was self-consciously aware that she and William Temple were living exactly the kind of romance that she loved in fictional form. Their clandestine courtship and family opposition, the thwarted love, secret letters and stolen hours together, were all essential ingredients of the kind of story that engrossed her at this time. Among her favourite authors was Madeleine de Scudéry,† who collaborated with her brother Georges on some writing projects. Her more successful novels, however, were hers alone, yet still published under his name. Dorothy read these in the original French and enjoyed them so much that she reread some of them in English translation, though she was scathing at how poorly this was done so that even the original story and characters were barely recognisable.

  During the last two years of Dorothy and William’s courtship, Dorothy was avidly reading Scudéry’s Artamène: ou Le Grand Cyrus. This was an epic story loosely based on the life of Cyrus the Great, who lived more than 500 years before Christ and founded the Persian Empire. It was possibly the longest novel in French, running to ten volumes of three books each, the whole more than 13,000 pages in the original. The action was made up of various abductions of the heroines interspersed with pages of conversations exploring fashionable ideas of Scudéry’s own time, such as the nature of love, the desirability or otherwise of marriage, the education of women, appropriate conduct and personal virtue. A composite novel like this was written to be read in sections, sometimes aloud among friends who would then discuss the ideas it raised and the personalities and motivations of the characters. The fictional conversations evoked that leisured Parisian salon society of lively philosophical debate and cultural talk where women had a voice. This metropolitan intellectual world appealed greatly to a clever young woman like Dorothy and yet was closed to her, immured in the English countryside, whiling away the hours by the bedside of her dying father.

  Dorothy’s own letters to William were essentially conversations with him, explorations of various ideas and feelings, as well as evocative details of their everyday life. Volume ten of Scudéry’s great baggy work contains L’histoire de Sapho in which the author identified closely with Sappho herself: Dorothy too might feel a thrill of recognition of her own literary powers when reading, ‘her works are so tender that the hearts of all who read what she writes are moved … She can describe sentiments difficult to describe with such delicacy, and she knows so well how to anatomise an amorous heart.’30

  Impressed and excited by this sprawling novel, Dorothy found it captured so well the feminine point of view in discussions of human conduct and desire that she agreed with the prevalent gossip that a woman’s sensibility was somewhere to be found behind the male persona of the author: ‘They say the Gentelman that write this Romance has a Sister that lives with him as Mayde [unmarried] and she furnishes him with all the litle Story’s that come between soe that hee only Contrives the maine designe and when hee wants somthing to Entertaine his company withall hee call’s to her for it. Shee has an excelent fancy sure, and a great deal of witt.’31 In fact, the whole conception and execution of the novel was Madame de Scudéry’s, while her brother was credited with her work and promoted on the strength of his supposed literary prowess.

  Poor William was exhorted by Dorothy to read these multi-volume novels too and despite his valiant efforts to please, one of her letters hints that he was perhaps less than mustard-keen himself: ‘If you have done with the first Part of Cyrus I should bee glad Mr Hollingsworth had it [she had promised it to his wife and this was the third time she had to ask William to pass it on] I have a third Tome heer against you have done the second, and to Encourage you let mee assure you that the more you read of them you will like them still better.’32

  Her insistence that he read them and then discuss which of the characters he found most affecting, and the motivations for various actions in the byzantine plots, was all part of the continuing conversation with him she so valued. It was through this mutual reading and commentary that Dorothy and William got to know each other’s temperaments and ideals; she was delighted when he agreed with her analysis o
f four of the lovers whose stories they had both read separately and then discussed. But this conversation through the novels and more directly in her letters to William was also an opportunity for a young woman, deprived of intellectual stimulation, to exercise her mind in philosophical debate.

  In the isolation of her life at Chicksands, constrained by her father’s illness and the expectations laid on her as an unmarried daughter, a book like Cyrus not only provided Dorothy with the escapism of exotic tales of romance and derring-do but, more importantly, a sense of listening in on a sophisticated Parisian salon, much like the one that de Scudéry eventually founded. These fictional debates were more satisfying when continued in the real world with William, most significantly in discussing the relationships between men and women and her desire for a marriage of equals.

  In Cyrus, Sapho tells her friends the secret of good relations between men and women: ‘there is nothing you can’t say in conversation, as long as you consider well where you are and to whom you speak and who you are yourself.’33 Dorothy seemed naturally to live by this maxim, for she suggested to William her revolutionary idea that men and women prior to marriage should live under the same roof to discover how they truly got on: ‘For my part I think it were very convenient that all such as intend to marrye should live together in the same house some year’s of probation and if in all that time they never disagreed they should then bee permitted to marry if they pleasd, but how few would doe it then.’34

  Although Dorothy was confident that she and William would make an harmonious marriage, if ever they were given the chance, she was surrounded by examples of unhappily married couples, or couples deadeningly indifferent to each other. Her uncle Francis Osborne in his much read Advice to a Son, was vituperative about women and marriage. In some mitigation perhaps of his harsh stance, he was particularly concerned that his only son John should not be ensnared in a union based on love or lust rather than financial good sense, for the life of the impoverished and dispossessed gentry was a peculiarly narrow and meagre one, as he, a younger son, appreciated. In this book that Dorothy and even William had surely read at some point, Osborne wrote this as part of a long rhetorical rant: ‘Marriage, like a Trap set for Flies, may possibly be ointed at the Entrance, with a little Voluptuousness, under which is contained a draught of deadly wine.’35