Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  Cromwell’s abolition of the Rump Parliament in 1653, in what was in effect a military coup, opened the way for his parliament of specially selected men ‘fearing God and of approved fidelity and honesty’, 140 pious men of mixed religious allegiance. Their purpose was to express God’s will in government and they became known as the Barebones Parliament, named after one of its members Praise-God Barbon (or Barebone), one of the radical sect of Fifth Monarchists.* This parliament started off with good intentions, removing the injustice of tithes for instance, but it lacked administrative experience and executive organisation and so had no alternative plan for paying the clergy. Barebones turned out to be pretty bare and lasted only five months: Cromwell then stepped into the breach as lord protector.

  Lucy Hutchinson, biographer of her husband, the parliamentarian Colonel John Hutchinson, and a Puritan intellectual, was dismayed by how degenerate the army and parliament had become, no better in her eyes than the royalists, ‘the dissolute army they had beaten’. But she disapproved also of the pretensions of Cromwell’s immediate family: ‘His wife and children were setting up for principality, which suited no better with any of them than scarlet [a dignitary’s robes] on the ape.’ Despite the disappointment to her rigorous principles, and her unhappiness at how tainted the revolution had become, she still retained her respect for Cromwell the man, ‘to speak truth of himself, he had much natural greatness in him, and well became the place he had usurped’. The people around him, however, were another matter and Lucy Hutchinson did not hide her scorn: ‘His court was full of sin and vanity, and the more abominable because they had not yet quite cast away the name of God, but profaned it by taking it in vain upon them. True religion was now almost lost, even among the religious party, and hypocrisy became an epidemical disease, to the sad grief of Colonel Hutchinson and all true-hearted Christians and Englishmen.’1

  Lucy and her husband were intelligent, highly principled and passionate supporters of parliament during the civil wars and their disillusionment would not be shared by the defeated royalists with their different expectations, yet the criticism they voiced was multiplied many times by their opponents. A committed Anglican and natural royalist like John Evelyn, worshipping at his own church in early December, was outraged when a rude working man stepped into the pulpit and preached a farrago of ‘truculent anabaptisticall stuff’. It made him wonder, ‘so dangerous a Crisis were things growne to’.2 In his view it was not just the breakdown in traditional religious ceremony that was so distressing, it was the loosening of society’s mores too that shocked: ‘I now observed how the Women began to paint themselves, formerly a most ignominious thing, & used onely by prostitutes.’3 Izaak Walton, in his Compleat Angler published the previous year, had noticed much the same new fashion for colourful make-up, ‘the Artificial Paint or Patches in which [women] so much pride themselves in this age’.4

  But as the country struggled to reinvent itself there was an unexpected mix of libertarian and authoritarian decrees. Censorship was much less strict and literature flourished; operas were allowed to be performed yet plays were banned and theatres closed; women had grown bolder yet the Puritan ethic celebrated their domestic virtues and modest demeanour; the law dispensed greater justice with far less corruption yet power still remained in the hands of the few; and wider enfranchisement, as agitated for by the Levellers,* was still just a dream.

  Over all this complex reorganisation and political manoeuvring towered a man equally full of contradictions. Even to his contemporaries, Oliver Cromwell confounded straightforward analysis. Lucy Hutchinson, betrayed by the revolution’s loss of principle, was still in awe of the greatness of the man whose vision and force of character had driven it through. Clarendon, the grandest of royalist intellects, approved of the fact that Cromwell lacked the ruthlessness Machiavelli demanded in a great leader (refusing to countenance a suggested massacre of all royalist opposition) but deplored his ‘many Crimes … for which Hell-fire is prepared’. However, he had to admit that Cromwell had the exceptional qualities that made someone celebrated far beyond his own times, although Clarendon also found it hard to disentangle the central contradiction in his nature, judging him ‘a brave wicked Man’.5 It was left to Cromwell’s servant John Maidston to make one of the many memorable statements about this compelling paradox of a man: ‘A larger soule, I think, hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay than his was.’6

  Although from a family of deep-dyed royalists, whose loss of wealth and good fortune could be laid at Cromwell’s door, Dorothy was as fascinated by the first family as anyone. Her fancy had been caught by the thought that she might have become Mrs Henry Cromwell if she had not already decided she preferred a man called Temple. Dorothy too had noticed the pleasure that Cromwell’s wife Elizabeth took in her own elevation alongside her husband, likening the value she laid on William’s letters to Mrs Cromwell’s enjoyment of her new status: ‘[I] have bin fonder of your letters then my Lady Protector is of her new honnour,’7 she wrote in the cold month of January when there was little else to entertain.

  William had curbed his tearing impatience to see Dorothy, and waited until after Christmas as she had asked. He was desperate to hear from her own lips the reasons for her capitulation to the pressures of the world in deciding they should not marry. She thought she was being noble and doing the best for him in releasing him from a hopeless bond, but William shocked her with his violent response, or as she expressed it, ‘how ill an interpretation you made of this’.8

  Just over a week into the new year of 1654, his horse clattered into the courtyard at Chicksands. Henry, Dorothy’s brother most antagonistic to the match, was elsewhere for at least a day and the two distraught lovers could face each other away from their families’ gazes. Dorothy recalled her turmoil on seeing William at last: ‘Good god the fear’s and surprizes, the crosses and disorders of that day, twas confused enough to bee a dream and I am apt to think somtimes it was noe more[.] but noe I saw you, when I shall doe againe god only know’s, can there bee a more Romance Story then ours would make if the conclusion should prove happy[?] Ah I dare not hope it.’9

  It would appear from this and subsequent letters that in a passionate reunion William managed to persuade Dorothy that their love could prevail after all. She recognised that no amount of reasoning on her side would diminish his determination to marry her. He excused his frantic reaction and emotional outburst by explaining that some man whom he trusted had told him Dorothy was betrothed to another. He thought that was the real motive for her letter. She reassured him ‘that you have still the same power in my heart that I gave you at our last parteing; that I will never marry any Other, and that iff Ever Our fortun’s will allow us to marry you shall dispose mee as you please’.

  Given his temperament and youth it was remarkable how constant he was to her over the years. They met so infrequently the memory of her distinctive character and beauty must have been powerfully reinforced by her entertaining and emotionally candid letters. This was truly an epistolary courtship in which Dorothy, largely secluded in the country, managed to maintain her erotic hold on an extremely handsome and highly sexed young man with much greater freedom to roam. William was about to go to Ireland to see his father who had just returned there to take up his latest employment, and he promised Dorothy he would do his best to persuade Sir John to let him marry the woman he loved. Dorothy admitted she still could not hold out much hope: ‘noe, tis too great a happinesse, and I that know my self best must acknoledge I deserve crosses and affliction but can never merritt such a blessing’.10

  Sharing the news of another friend who had married someone she did not care for, purely for his fortune, and declared, ‘How merry and pleased she is’, Dorothy wrote with some despair to William about her lack of sympathy with this mercenary ethos and wish to be free of such a world: ‘this is the worlde[,] would you and I were out on’t, for sure wee were not made to live in it,’ she wrote and then recalled with nostalgia the little cottage th
ey had glimpsed once on the island of Herm, when they had first met and longed to live and die together in rustic simplicity ‘where Piety and Love were all there wealth and in theire poverty feasted the Gods where rich men shutt them out’.

  Dorothy still could not bring herself to believe that all would be well, but she had enough confidence to request from William: ‘Before you goe I must have a ring from you too, a plaine Golde one, if I Ever marry it shall bee my wedding ring or when I dye, I’le give it you againe.’*11

  This last momentous meeting of the lovers was interrupted by the return to Chicksands of Dorothy’s jealous brother. In his diary Henry wrote, breaking into code: ‘Jan. 13, Friday morninge. – I came to Chicksands before dinner. I found Mr Temple here and my sister broke with him. God be praised.’12 Dorothy relayed to William with some amusement that her brother, in witnessing the sadness with which they had parted – William was about to leave for Ireland – had jumped to his own longed-for conclusion that they had at last called the whole thing off. Dorothy allowed him to continue with this misapprehension because he was suddenly kind and solicitous and also less suspicious of her letters and movements in general.

  Just before he left on his journey, William conscientiously sent Dorothy ‘a payer [of] good french tweeses’ and certain essences that she had requested from London. But he had avoided fulfilling the much more important commission, to send her the engagement ring. Nothing focuses the mind like the possibility of loss and Dorothy, having been the one more in control of the relationship so far, putting William on the rack with her, albeit temporary, withdrawal from their contract, had to remind him a second time to buy her the ring. Three weeks later, she was still waiting for it, sending him one of hers so that he could size it, and suggesting that it was preferable, perhaps, not to have it inscribed so that it ‘will make my wearing it the leese Observed’.13

  William did not fully appreciate just how much Dorothy hated attracting attention to herself, how she feared being gossiped about and ridiculed, for, unlike William, she believed most people thought the worst of others. It was an area of strife between them. He continually pointed out that he thought her concern with what the world thought of her mere vanity, an analysis she vehemently rejected. She explained that facing a life without wealth never troubled her, but she had her pride and he had to accept her as she was. Too many apparent love matches had proved to be the opposite, the people who embarked on them reckless and foolish, degraded in the eyes of the world and love itself devalued: ‘I confesse that I have an humor will not suffer mee to Expose my self to Peoples Scorne, the name of Love is growne soe contemptible by the ffolly of such as have falcely prettended to it, and soe many Giddy People have marryed upon that score and repented soe shamefully afterwards, that nobody can doe any thing that tends towards it without being esteem’d a rediculous person … I never prettended to witt in my life, but I cannot bee sattisfyed that the worlde shoulde think mee a foole.’14

  William’s robust response to this admission did not amuse her. In a cross riposte Dorothy stated dramatically that she believed everyone thought reputation more important than anything, but she in fact could live without it as long as she was free of the world and its commentary: ‘I could beat you for writeing this last strange letter … In Earnest, I beleeve there is nobody displeased that People speak well of them and reputation is esteem’d by all of much greater Valew then life it selfe.’15

  Contrary to what Dorothy claimed, William was one at least who did not value reputation over life itself. In one of his early essays, that she had almost certainly read, he recognised the subjective nature of the judgements of others: ‘Honor and content consists both in meere opinion onely the difference is, the first consists wholly in others opinion, the last wholly in ones own,’16 and clearly preferred being happy by his own lights to chasing the good opinion of others.

  William did not fully appreciate how differently he and Dorothy interacted with the world. Put simply, he was optimistic and she more of a pessimist; he was expressive and she reflective; she was a thinker while emotion seemed to be his motive force. As a man of his times, too, his actions were far freer from censure than those of any woman. William had already written in one of his early essays how he considered that mankind naturally tended towards the good. Dorothy, in a letter to him, owned a completely opposite point of view, ‘as all are more forcibly inclined to ill then good, they are much apter to Exceede in detraction then in praises’.17 With this came a self-protectiveness and suspicion of others that expressed something of the emotional hardships and suffering of her youth.

  Despite the premature death of his mother, William’s early experiences were of freedom and benignity, sheltered as he was by the saintly Dr Hammond. He was exposed to far fewer of the harsh realities that were shaping Dorothy’s expectations, such as the betrayal of friends and parental despair. The apprehension that her life was to be marked by blighted hopes made Dorothy particularly fear William’s imminent trip to Ireland. ‘This is I hope our last misfortune lett’s beare it nobly … makeing a vertue of necessity,’18 she wrote in an attempt to reassure herself as much as him. Not only was William charged with the most crucial business in persuading his father to let them marry at last, but the journey itself was dangerous. In saying farewell, there was always a real possibility that it might be the final goodbye.

  Dorothy asked for a lock of William’s particularly luxuriant hair, which was duly sent, much to her sensual delight: ‘how fond I am of your Lock … I never saw finer haire nor of a better Couler, but cutt noe more on’t I would not have it spoyled for the world, if you love mee bee carefull on’t, I am combing and Curling and kissing this Lock all day, and dreaming ont all night.’19 In return she promised to send him a miniature of herself and to write every week.

  Henry learned that not only was he mistaken in thinking Dorothy’s relationship with William was ended but that his sister was more determined than ever to marry no one but him. In one of his regular heated arguments with her, in which on this occasion Dorothy had the upper hand, he sought to wrong-foot her by attacking William’s character: ‘hee was faine to say that hee feard as much your haveing a fortune as your haveing none, for hee saw you held my Lord L[isle]’s principles [Lisle was reputedly an atheist], that Religion or honnour were things you did not consider att all, and that hee was confident you would take any Engagement, serve in any employment or doe any thing to advance yourself.’20

  Dorothy was outraged. To be labelled an opportunist was one thing but to be accused of being an atheist was the greatest slur of all: ‘I never tooke any thing hee ever sayd halfe soe ill, as nothing sure is soe great an injury, it must suppose one to bee a Divell in human Shape.’21

  Dorothy’s reaction was not extreme for the time. The thought of atheism aroused unspeakable horror in most right-thinking men and women. It was not just that an atheist was seen as mistaken, he or she was considered an actively depraved person without moral compass and therefore not fit to be a full and trustworthy member of family or society: as Dorothy had expressed it, truly a devil in human form. Traditionally, atheistic ideas were considered of such extreme spiritual danger that anyone they contaminated would risk the soul’s eternal damnation: those so accused would be seen as corrupting and were ostracised and persecuted, even killed.

  The contemporary historian Bishop Burnet,* while agreeing William became a great and trustworthy statesman, vilified him for what he considered to be a lack of orthodox religious belief: ‘[Temple] thought religion was only for the mob. He was a great admirer of the sect of Confucius in China, who were aetheists themselves, but left religion to the rabble. He was a corrupter of all who came near him.’†22

  The great theologian Thomas Aquinas established the Church’s attitudes to unbelievers and stated that they were to be shut off from the world by death. So Dorothy’s horror that her brother should so stigmatise William was justified. Henry, however, had recognised something unusually open-minded and undo
gmatic in his sister’s chosen beau and had chosen to elaborate on that. William added to any unease by refusing to indulge in elaborate shows of piety and religious devotion. His cast of mind in fact was much closer to the sceptical humanism of Montaigne.

  Dorothy was passionately engaged with everything. She was naturally questioning and intellectually challenging. She loved following arguments through to their logical conclusions and while in full flight often pulled herself up, aware that she was ‘preaching’ too much. She returned time and again to the same subjects that caught her personal interest or philosophical curiosity, such as the desirability or otherwise of marriage, the variety of human relationships, the value of reputation, what constituted a good life.

  There was no chance that her brother’s slander of William’s morality and lack of a spiritual life could be ignored. She cast to the winds all her usual discretion. Unconcerned at how clearly she was revealing where her love and loyalty lay, Dorothy threw herself into the fray: ‘wee talked our selves weary hee renounced mee againe and I defyed him, but both in as Civill Language as it would permitt, and parted in great Anger with the Usuall Ceremony of a Leg [exaggerated bow] and a Courtesy [curtsy] that you would have dyed with Laughing to have seen us,’ she wrote to William with her characteristic eye for absurdity.

  The following day she avoided her brother by dining in her room, then late at night when everyone else had gone to bed just she and Henry remained: after half an hour he broke the pointed silence and revealed his own high emotionalism and fear of losing her: ‘at Last in a pittifull Tone, Sister say’s hee, I have heard you say that when any thing troubles you, of all things you aprehend goeing to bed, because there it increases upon you and you lye at the mercy of all your sad thoughts which the silence and the darknesse of the night adds a horror to; I am at that passe now, I vow to God I would not indure another night like the last to gaine a Crowne.’