Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  Even in that resolutely phallocratic age, there was some protest at his misogynistic tone and he added a sub-chapter entitled ‘To The Women Readers’ that showed some apprehension of women’s lot in marriage (he had three daughters as well as his son) but was hardly reassuring: ‘like the Angels sent to the rescue of Lot, Women do not only run the Hazard of their own Contamination by Marriage, to draw Men out of the Sins, no less than Punishments impending the Barren and Unnatural Delights of Solitude, but alter their Shapes, and embrace their Celestial Beauties, when by discharging their Husbands of the Venom of Love, they swell themselves into the Bulk and Dangers of Childbearing; losing their own Name and their Families, to perpetuate that of a mere Stranger.’ To add insult to injury, he pointed out, quite rightly, that even the most exalted women ‘in their highest Ruff’36 were in the eyes of the law and society no better than the best of servants, or like children, owning nothing of their own except by the dispensation of their husbands.

  In her letters to William, Dorothy continued the active debate about marriage and what each hoped for from theirs. She described marriages that had gone sour and offered her own theories as to why this had happened: the propensity of women to find fault, to nag and scold, and the prevalence of men who were bullying, oppressive or dull. Her trust in the enduring nature of married love was shaken by William’s report that Elizabeth Cheke, much valued by Dorothy as a cousin, had confided her unhappiness to him despite marrying Richard Franklin, generally considered ‘the best husband in the world’. Dorothy protested to William that this boded ill for all love matches: ‘Hee was soe passionate for her before hee had her, and soe pleased with her since, that in Earnest I doe not think it possible she could have any thing left to wish that she had not already, in such a husband with such a fortune [he had just bought the park and mansion Moor Park in Hertfordshire] … if she bee not [happy] I doe not see how any body else can hope for it.’37

  Her brother Henry, as a bully, was always alert to ways of undermining her dogged persistence in loving William and this time called on one of the writers of romances that Dorothy had discussed with William: ‘My B[rother]. urged [Lord Broghill’s* verses] against mee one day in a dispute where hee would needs make mee confesse that noe Passion could bee long lived and that such as were most in love forgott that ever they had bin soe within a twelve month after they were Marryed.’ Dorothy could not resist picking up every flung gauntlet and soon an argument was in full swing, but she was embarrassed at how few examples of happy marriage she could muster and instead flourished some ‘Pittifull Verses’ by Baron Byron, a royalist member of parliament, to his wife, but these were so insipid that they lost her the argument: ‘hee quickly Laught mee out of Countenance with sayeing they were Just as a marryed mans flame would produce, and a wife inspire.’38 In his next letter William kindly furnished her with some more satisfactory arguments in favour of love matches, should the debate be fanned into flame again.

  Full of concern for her dying father, Dorothy was expecting both her eldest and youngest brothers to join with her and Henry for a family reunion at Chicksands in the late summer of 1653. But before this longed-for occasion, news came of the sudden accidental death of Robin, Dorothy’s youngest and favourite brother, who had shared her adventures in the Isle of Wight and St Malo when she first met William. On a summer evening on 26 August, just after midnight, Robin at twenty-seven was accidentally drowned. This was her fourth brother to die in adulthood (two in the civil war, one of smallpox in France). The tragedy weakened an already failing Sir Peter. Five of his grown-up children were now dead before him. Dorothy answered more than forty letters of condolence, all the while thinking she would rather have been writing to William. Good fortune, if it had ever been her friend, now seemed to have deserted her. When she snatched time to write to her beloved, her melancholy was clear. Sudden and premature death made more poignant the years they had wasted hoping for some happy resolution: ‘there is noe such thing as perfect happynesse in this world … O mee whither am I goeing, sure tis the Deaths head I see stand before mee put mee into this grave discourse.’39

  William had known and liked Robin too. These unexpected and youthful deaths made for a certain urgency in those left behind to grasp life and make the most of everything. His impatience to see Dorothy, to be with her, was always more urgent than Dorothy’s, with her over-developed sense of duty and propriety. Her brother’s death had caused her to postpone a prospective journey to London when they would have met and William’s disappointment could not be hidden. Like Dorothy, he was also thinking about good fortune and elaborating on his theme in one of his essays written at this time. He suggested that contrary to the current belief, fortune was not in fact an objective reality that had to be courted and appeased but rather just a label whereby fearful or ignorant people sought to understand and control random events: ‘Tis unreasonable that I should give fortune so great a place in my thoughts, while shee gives mee so small an one in hers,’ he wrote, then after personifying fortune as a strumpet he turned to a more rationalistic critique:

  but to raile at fortune were to scold at an Eccho as one has no voice so t’other has no power but what wee give it, I might frett out my spleen, weare out my lungs, but to as little purpose as I do my penns … Wee say shee is blind when the truth ’ont is tis wee that are soe, our ignorance gives her a name; when wee cannot discover the cause of any effect, either because the way is darke or wee are purblind, tis but beleeving there is none, and then comes fortune in, like a cypher that signifies nothing and yet you may make it stand for whatere you please.40

  Playing tennis, visiting friends and writing letters and essays did not provide enough employment for an energetic and passionate young man in the prime of his youth. In the late summer of 1653 William was twenty-five and Dorothy one year older. The frustrations of a situation that seemed to have no clear and positive outcome were having a dangerously depressing effect on William’s spirits. He was beginning really to doubt the depth of Dorothy’s feelings for him and was certainly afraid that they would never be given their families’ blessings and perhaps never be free to consummate their love. The reports of his deteriorating state of mind alarmed Dorothy:

  I know your humor is strangly Altered from what it was, and I am sorry to see it. Melancholy must needs doe you more hurt then to another to whome it may bee Naturall, as I think it is to mee, therfore if you loved mee you would take heed ont. Can you beleeve that you are dearer to mee then the whole world besyd’s and yet necglect yourself[?]. If you doe not, you wrong a perfect friendship, and if you doe, you must consider my interest in you and preserve your self to make mee happy[.] promise mee this or I shall haunte you worse then she [melancholy] doe’s mee.41

  Dorothy, aware of William’s distress, excited by a discussion she overheard between her brother and the vicar about the possibility of human flight, literally longed to fly to his side:

  How often have I wisht my self with you though but for a day for an hower, I would have given all the time I am to spend heer for it with all my heart. You would not but have Laught if you had seen mee last night. My Br[other Henry] and Mr Gibson* [a vicar living at Chicksands] were talking by the fyre and I satt by, but as noe part of the company. Amongst other things (which I did not at all minde) they fell into a discourse of fflyeing and both agreed that it was very posible to finde out a way that people might fly like Birds and dispatch theire Journy’s soe I that had not sayd a word all night started up at that and desyr’d they would say a litle more in it, for I had not marked the begining, but instead of that they both fell into soe Violent a Laughing that I should apeare soe much concern’d in such Art; but they litle knew of what use it mght have bin to mee.42

  William found the difficulties and frustrations almost harder to bear because there was always the hope that circumstances would change. Sir Peter Osborne was close to death but seemed to be tenaciously clinging to life, his own father was about to take up his new post in Ireland which
released some of the Temple family pressure on the ill-fated lovers, but things moved so slowly and nothing was conclusive. Using his essays to unload the thoughts and feelings that crowded his brain, William explored the unbearableness of hope offered and continually deferred:

  [hope] often shakes the constancy of a couragious man, no man but sits firmer upon one stoole than hee does betweene two. that mind must needs waver that is plac’d betwene hope and feare … tis hard for a man in a dungeon not to cast his eye upon the light, that through some little crevice crowds in, rather to disease [disquiet] then comfort him by keeping alive in him the regrett and desire of light wch would soon dye in continued darknesse.43

  Dorothy knew that their continued separation was increasing his agitation and fostering his melancholy. The tedium of her days was depressing her too. Having to entertain dull friends and nosy relations who visited and stayed for hours, sometimes days, enduring their endless chatter drove her almost to breaking point: ‘How often doe I sitt in company a whole day and when they are gon am not able to give an account of sixe words that was sayd, and many times could bee soe much better pleased with the Entertainment my owne thoughts give mee, that tis all I can doe to bee soe civill.’44 She then had to welcome two deaf-mute gentlemen, one a previous suitor, who exhausted her with the effort of communicating by signs. The menaces of London society were of a different kind from those of the country but Dorothy was ready to become a hermit in the woods to escape it all: ‘I am heer [at Chicksands] much more out of Peoples way then in Towne, where my Aunte [Lady Gargrave] and such as prettend an interest in mee and a power over mee, doe soe persecute mee with theire good motions, and take it soe ill that they are not accepted, as I would live in a hollow tree to avoyde them.’ Yet home was no better, for she not only had ‘my Brother to Torment mee’ but the small-minded intrusive gossips of the neighbourhood where ‘the tittle tattle [her stream of suitors] breeds amongst neighbours that have nothing to doe but inquire whoe marry’s and who makes love’.45

  As some diversion from the monotonous days, she had been sitting to Sir Peter Lely for her portrait.* Dorothy could not work out whether it had captured her looks and expression completely, although she admitted that it was the best likeness she had ever had made and Lely claimed that he had taken more pains with this than with any portrait he had done before – and this in the year he painted the great portrait of Cromwell ‘warts and all’. She sent the painting to William to hang in his room (‘with the light on the left hand of it’) until she offered him the real thing. Dorothy was very aware, however, of the prevailing conceit that women’s beauty began to decay from the age of eighteen: her mother, she recalled, allowed an extra two years before the downhill slide into age-raddled invisibility: ‘my time for Pictur’s is past … There is a beauty in Youth that every body has once in theire lives, and I remember my Mother used to say there was never any body (that was not deformed) but were handsom to some reasonable degree, once between fowerteen and twenty.’46

  It was late October and the days were much shorter and growing winter-cold. It was five years since they had first met and determined that one day they would marry, but the years had passed and gained Dorothy and William little beyond the emotional exhaustion of hopes raised and dashed, while they lived at the mercy of others. Their dissimilar temperaments coped very differently with the frustrations and uncertainty of their situation. Dorothy, more rational and inclined to pessimism, would argue the difficulties but maintain the faith while William, emotional and impetuous, was keener to storm the barriers set against them and deal with the fallout as it happened. But when his spirits failed, she was quick to raise hers to reassure him.

  Dorothy’s letters were eloquent of her love for him and her loyalty until death. In one beginning ‘Why are you so sullen, and why am I the cause’, she explained how she would rather have a husband who hated her than one who was merely indifferent. Marriage was for her a continuing philosophical debate, how society perceived it and the variety of ways that individuals lived it. Her letters were always sparklingly conversational but this time she launched into a brilliant and mischievous soliloquy in her attempt to list the qualities she did not require in the man she would marry: in the process she illuminated the society she lived in and, as the positive to her negatives, the character of William himself.

  First … our humors [mental dispositions] must agree, and to doe that hee must have that kinde of breeding that I have had and used that kinde of company, that is hee must not bee soe much of a Country Gentleman as to understand Nothing but hawks and dog’s and bee fonder of Either then of his wife, nor of the next sort of them whose aime reaches noe further then to bee Justice of the peace and once in his life high Sheriff who read noe book but Statut’s and study’s nothing but how to bake a speech interlarded with Latin that may amaze his disagreeing poore Neighbours and fright them rather then perswade them into quietnesse. Hee must not bee a thing that began the world in a free scoole was sent from thence to the University and is at his farthest when hee reaches the Inn’s of Court has noe acquaintance but thos of his form [‘standing’ crossed out] in these places speaks the french hee has pickt out of Old Law’s, and admires nothing but the storry’s hee has heard of the Revells that were kept there before his time. Hee must not bee a Towne Gallant neither that lives in a Tavern and an Ordinary [general officer], that cannot imagin how an hower should bee spent without company unlesse it bee in sleeping[,] that makes court to all the Women hee sees thinks they beleeve him and Laughs and is Laught at Equaly; Nor a Traveld Monsieur whose head is all feather inside and outside, that can talk at nothing but dances and Duells, and has Courage Enough to were slashes [decorative slits in his clothes] where every body else dy’s with cold to see him. Hee must not bee a foole of noe sort, nor peevish nor ill Natur’d nor proude nor Coveteous, and to all this must bee added that he must Love mee and I him as much as wee are capable of Loveing. Without all this his fortune though never soe great would not sattisfye mee and with it a very moderat one would keep mee from ever repenting my disposall.47

  It was a sign of the increasing tension between them that William failed to find this tour de force as charming as he tended to consider everything else she wrote. His spirits sapped by increasing pessimism about their situation, he did not appreciate her irony and complained instead that she seemed to know better what qualities she did not approve of than those she positively liked. In her answering letter, Dorothy was defensive but apologetic too: ‘I thought you had understood better what kinde of person I liked then any body else could posibly have don.’ She explained that the men she had described would always have been unacceptable to her, even had she never met the estimable ‘Mr T’. No doubt, she added, such men would have made good husbands to other women but it was their unsympathetic interests and intellects that she personally found so off-putting.

  Even though it was expected that she, as the woman, should conform her disposition to her husband’s, Dorothy maintained she could never manage such a distortion of her own nature: ‘I have lived soe longe in the world and soe much at my owne liberty that whosoever has mee must bee content to take mee as they finde mee, without hope of ever makeing mee other then I am.’ She realised this desire for a marriage of equals, where her personal qualities, rights and desires were as valuable as her husband’s, was radical and counter to all the conventions and expectations of her age and class. Nearly 300 years before Virginia Woolf’s famous protestation, Dorothy, like her, declined to be merely the mirror to a man, reflecting him at twice his natural size. Thinking of Sir Justinian, Dorothy warned William: ‘I could not have fflattered him into a beleife that I admir’d him, to gaine more then hee and all his Generation are wor[th].’ She ended her letter: ‘I have made a generall confession to you, will you give mee absolution[?]’48

  When Dorothy eventually managed to travel to London at the end of October she was in the company of her brother Henry and her brother-in-law Sir Thomas Peyton, with his n
ew wife Cecilia. Dorothy was not well and the long-desired meeting between the lovers did not go at all smoothly. A few short messages from Dorothy to William during this unhappy stay in London show that she was prevented from seeing him as much as both would wish. He was miserable and insecure, she doubtful and indecisive, neither of them was sleeping, each accusing the other of weakening resolve. In one letter she complained of the fiddlers under her window that further tormented her sleepless nights but added that she intended to do whatever she could to make William happy: ‘quoy qui’l en sera vous ne sçaurois jamais doubté que Je ne vous ayme plus que toutes les Choses du monde [whatever may happen you shall never doubt that I love you more than anything in the world].’49

  But William was not reassured, he had said he thought her false, that she had given him ‘an Etternell ffarwell’,50 something Dorothy vehemently denied. She returned to Chicksands disturbed and disappointed, having lost so much weight nobody back home would believe she hadn’t been desperately ill. Once she went to look at herself in her looking-glass she told William she discovered ‘I have not brought downe the same face I carryed up.’ The strain of the last few days had taken its toll on her spirits too. Dorothy wrote in the same letter that ‘I would not live though, if I had not some hope left that a little time may breed great Alterations, and that tis posible wee may see an End of our misfortunes.’ She then added dramatically, ‘When that hope leav’s us, then tis time to dye.’51