by Jane Dunn
Dorothy’s sympathetic heart was touched and she talked of her own melancholy and they ended up discussing religion avidly into the night: ‘it layed all our anger, wee grew to a calme and peace with all the world; two hermitts conversing in a Cell they Equaly inhabit, never Expressed more humble Charritable Kindenesse one towards another then wee, hee asked my Pardon and I his, and hee has promised mee never to speak of it to mee whilest hee liv’s but leave the Event to God Almighty.’
Henry’s peace-making, however, did not extend to her possible eventual marriage: his peculiar possessiveness and visceral dislike of William meant he threatened to withdraw from her life should she proceed with her misguided intent. ‘Till hee sees it don,’ she continued her letter, ‘hee will bee always the same to mee that hee is; then hee shall leave mee hee say’s not out of want of Kindenesse to mee, but because hee cannot see the Ruine of a Person that hee lov’s soe passionatly and in whose happiness hee had layed up all his.’
William recognised that Henry’s stance was more that of the thwarted lover who saw him as a rival than that of a brother concerned for his sister’s happiness. Nevertheless, Dorothy ended this story by reassuring William: ‘you have noe reason to fear him in any respect for though hee should break his promise hee should never make mee break mine; noe let mee assure you, this Rivall nor any other shall Ever Alter mee Therefor spare your Jelousy or turne it all into kindenesse.’23
William’s departure for Ireland was further delayed as he waited for his sister Martha to join him on the journey. Martha was by then in her fifteenth year and had been privy to a good deal of the amatory drama and anguish of her eldest and much admired brother. A clever, pretty girl, she had already established a close bond with her brother in the years while he was a young man about town in London. William obviously shared some of the content of Dorothy’s letters with her as there were comments passed back from Martha, who later herself wrote of the extraordinary human fascination and literary merit of the letters.
A vignette Dorothy wrote of her dealings with her latest suitor might well have entertained both William and his sister. The misguided young man, James Beverley, was a Bedfordshire neighbour and had been a fellow student with William at Emmanuel College. When he first heard of his temerity in paying suit to Dorothy, William duly dubbed him ‘a whelp’ (Beverley later countered that William was ‘the Proudest imperious insulting ilnatured man that Ever was’).24 When Beverley ignored the hint that she was not interested and turned up at Chicksands determined on pressing his suit, Dorothy protected herself against any embarrassing declarations by insisting that two women friends chaperone her throughout the time he was there.
The friends did their duty by being solidly present and listening intently, while pointedly gazing out of the window. When the young suitor managed to hand Dorothy a letter and confessed ‘(in a whispering voyce that I could hardly hear my self) that the Letter (as my Lord Broghill [writer of popular romances] says) was of great concern to him, and beggd I would read it and give him my answer. I took it up presently [at once] as if I meant it, but threw it sealed into the fire and told him (as softly as hee spoke to mee) I thought that the quickest and best way of answering it.’25 The poor man was so nonplussed that he sat speechless for a while as his letter of proposal burned before excusing himself and taking his leave.
The incident showed Dorothy as a young woman of frightening aplomb and, contrary to the expectations of female behaviour then, surprisingly free of concern for the man’s feelings and frank in the expression of her own. The urbane Lord Savile would have frowned: ‘suppress your impatience for fools,’ he advised in his published advice to his daughter, otherwise you court their slanderous revenge; laughing at a blockhead was like ‘throwing snowballs against bullets’, he feared, for a good woman’s reputation may be put at stake: ‘it is the disadvantage of a woman that the malice of the world will help the brutality of those who will throw a slovenly untruth upon her.’26 Men must be handled circumspectly and with tolerant care, even when they were drunkards, lechers, chronic gamblers, or raging bulls. ‘A virtue stuck with bristles is too rough for this age; it must be adorned with some flowers … so that even where it may be fit to strike, do it like a lady, gently.’27 When he heard about how peremptory Dorothy had been with her unwanted suitor, brother Henry thought her pretty ‘severe’, but wished she would be as brutal with someone else far closer to her heart.
Dorothy’s severity was called up not against William but his father, for she had heard that he, in response to his unhappy son, had questioned her motives in breaking off the secret engagement. She, who cared so much that the world did not misunderstand her, now had to deal with her prospective father-in-law’s view that she was manipulative, even duplicitous, in entertaining the idea of marrying someone else, with little concern for his son’s feelings. Dorothy struggled for equanimity – and even attempted some of William’s professed indifference to the opinion of others: ‘Let your father think mee what hee pleases, if he com’s to know mee the rest of my Actions shall Justifie mee in this, if hee dos not, i’le begin to practise upon him (what you have soe often preachd to mee) to neglect the report of the world and sattisfye my self in my owne innocency.’28
Her lack of fortune, and by this time her almost old-maidish age (Dorothy was in her twenty-seventh year), show that she must have had significant personal attractions to remain quite such a magnet for the numerous suitors who beat a path to her door. Valentine’s Day provided more talk of love and another possible suitor. Dorothy explained how she and her companion Jane Wright and the vicar’s wife Mrs Goldsmith selected their valentines for Valentine’s Day. Dorothy wrote on a card their own three names and then three men’s names, William, her recently snubbed suitor James Beverley and Humphrey Fysshe, a neighbour who had been sheriff of Bedford and was known as a ladies’ man.* She then cut the card into equal pieces, asked her friends to draw the names first and was delighted to find William’s name left for her. They played it a second time and once again she and William were paired together. Dorothy wrote to him of this happy coincidence, pointing out her pleasure in the outcome was so great it overcame her usual modesty about admitting to such things: ‘You cannot imagin how I was delighted with this little accident, but by takeing notice that I cannot forbear telling you it.’
She then went on to relate an incident telling of the enduring nature of her charms, perhaps enhanced by being caught in her nightclothes:
I was not halfe soe pleased with my Encounter next morning, I was up Early but with noe desig[n]e of getting another Valentine and goeing out to walk in my Nightcloths and Nightgowne I mett Mr Fish goeing a hunting I think hee was, but hee stayed to tell me I was his Valentine, and I should not have bin rid on him quickly if hee had not thought himself a little too Necgligeé [incompletely dressed] his haire was not pouderd and his Cloths were but ordinary, to say truth hee looked then my thought like Other Mortall People.29
Just as William finally set off for Ireland with his little sister Martha, Dorothy’s years of care for her father came to an end with the old cavalier’s death on 11 March 1654. This loss, although long expected, coming at a time when she was full of foreboding about William and his mission, roused the old superstition that she was born for disappointment. She had a superstition too that ill-fortune did not travel alone. Although Sir Peter’s death released her from one of the greatest obstacles to her marriage, the loss of a much loved father filled her with grief, made all the more burdensome since friends and acquaintances thought she should feel instead relief: ‘it was an infinite Mercy in God Almighty to take him out of a worlde that can bee pleasing to none, and was made more uneasy to him by many infirmity’s that were upon him; Yet to mee it is an affliction much greater then People Judge it.’
Apart from natural grief, Dorothy had to face too an immediate practical and social loss of the home she had known since she was a child, and with it all the human relationships in the household and neighbourhood. He
r elder brother John, as the heir to Chicksands, would take over the estate and was set to move his family into the house. She and Henry had to find somewhere else to live, and that meant with other members of her extended family. But to them she was merely an impoverished relation whose presence was inconvenient, yet whose life, as an unmarried woman, they felt they had some jurisdiction over.
To be suddenly homeless and beholden to others was unsettling and further diminished her autonomy. Dorothy revealed her hopes that her brother John would invite her to stay on at Chicksands, but this did not happen and she had to accept whatever was offered by more distant relations. She naturally resented this dependency and sense of obligation to others, even though she was expected to pay her board and lodging. ‘I am left by his death in the condition (which of all Others) is the most insuportable to my Nature; to depende upon Kindred that are not friends, and that though I Pay as much as I should doe to a stranger, yet think they doe mee a Curtesy … if hee [brother John] offers mee to stay heer, this hole will bee more agreeable to my humor, then any place that is more in the worlde.’30
The death of her father, however, gave her emotional freedom at last. On the day of his burial, Dorothy made the categorical statement to her brother Henry that she would marry no one but William Temple. In his anger Henry breached Dorothy and William’s pact of secrecy and broadcast their long clandestine love affair, putting as dishonourable a spin on it as he could. Dorothy was horrified to hear the unflattering and untrue rumours that began circulating, and was particularly protective of William whose character was blackened in Henry’s version of events. To grief and uncertainty now were added anger and shame. With William away she had to face this alone. She wrote absolving him from his promise of discretion and asked him to acknowledge their engagement publicly to counter some of the gossip. Overwhelmed with emotion, Dorothy confided to him this brotherly betrayal:
[Henry] resolves to revenge himself upon mee by representing this Action in such Coulers as will amaze all People that know mee, and doe not know him enough to discerne his mallice to mee; hee is not able to forbear shewing it now [during mourning], when my condition deserv’s pitty from all the worlde, I think, and that hee himself has newly lost a Father, as well as I, but takes this time to Torment mee, which appear’s (at least to mee) soe barbarous a Cruelty that though I thank god I have Charrity Enough perfectly to forgive all the injury’s hee can doe mee, yet I am afrayde I shall never look upon him as a brother more.31
Once Dorothy had received news that William and his sister, after a difficult voyage, had arrived safely in Dublin, the tension in her letters was released and she could see the funny side of some of the rumours that continued to elaborate on her dire future with William. All her servants at Chicksands had bade her fond farewells as she left Chicksands but they expected her to go immediately to William and were fearful for her, having heard terrible reports of life in Ireland from beggars at the door, either the poor dispossessed Irish themselves or the soldiers who had fought there. Her last jilted suitor, James Beverley, added his own vilification of William to the general malicious gossip and momentarily gave Dorothy pause for thought – as his chamber fellow at university he had known him before she had and what he said struck at the very heart of her longing for a marriage of equals: ‘[Beverley] Pitty’s mee to[o] and swear’s I am condemned to bee the misserablest Person upon Earth … before [William] has had mee a week [he] shall use mee with contempt, and beleeve that the favour was of his Side [William had got the better bargain]; [this] is not very confortable … and though hee knew you before I did I doe not think hee know’s you soe well,’32 she wrote to William, anxiously seeking his reassurance.
With her engagement public at last much of the pressure on Dorothy was relieved. The reality of exposure was not as humiliating as she had feared. And she was an eloquent advocate for her own situation and could at last put her side of the story. Brother Henry had no more reason to regard her movements with suspicion, checking her mail and searching the house, and so Dorothy’s letters were no longer sent and received clandestinely. Just one of William’s letters to her during their long courtship survived. It was written after Dorothy made it absolutely clear to her family that she would marry only him, perhaps indicating that she could keep his letters without fear of discovery at last.
This letter bursts into the correspondence with such passion and immediacy William appears to be almost in the room with her. Dorothy herself likened receiving it as being akin to the sun arriving to revive the inhabitants of Greenland after winter, ‘a night of half a yeer long’.33 William was writing from his father’s house in Dublin, with the post boy ‘bawling at mee for my letter’ outside. Dorothy was in London and he had been frantic with worry because he had not heard from her in a week and again feared that his own letters were being intercepted by her brother. He had told his father that if he did not receive a letter by the next post he would set off back to England, so desperate was he to see her and make sure she was all right. Above all he feared the sustained attacks on him in his absence might have undermined her love at this the last hurdle.
Sir John Temple was dismayed to hear this plan; he had already been alarmed at the almost suicidal state William had descended into during Dorothy’s attempted break of their relationship, at the end of the previous year, and told his son his emotional state meant he could not trust him out of his sight. His father also looked forward to spending a little more time with him. William reported impatiently that a disaster needed but a split second and he could not afford to risk anything now: ‘alas who knows not what mischances and how great changes have oftend happend in a little time.’
Despite having just arrived in Dublin and the disappointment it would cause his father, and sister, William assured Dorothy he would set off immediately to be with her if she just said the word: ‘Well now in very good earnest doe you thinke tis time for mee to come or noe, would you bee very glad to see mee there, and could you doe it in less disorder and with less suprisse then you did at Ch[icksands]: I aske you theese questions very seriously, but yett how willingly would I venture all to bee with you.’
He addressed the slanders against him by writing to her from the heart; she was all that mattered to him and he was what she had made him: ‘There is no artificial humility, no I am past all that with you, I know well enough that I am as other people are, but at that rate that me things [methinks] the world goes, I can see nothing in it to putt a value upon besides you, and beleeve mee whatever you have brought mee to and how you have done it I know not but I was never intended for that fond thing which people tearme a lover.’ Feeling very much the geographical distance between them, he feared any intimation that Dorothy might be swayed by circumstances or the ill judgements of others. William always maintained his stance, however, that what mattered were their own values, insisting that the opinions of others were of scant concern: ‘tis no vanity this, but a true sense of how pure and how refind a nature my passion is, which none can ever know besides my owne heart unles you finde it out beeing there’.
He reiterated the belief in their love for each other that had kept them constant through six years of separation and family opposition: ‘I know you love mee still, you promised it mee, and thats all the security I can have for all the good I am ever lik to have in this world, tis that which makes all things else seeme nothing to it, so high it setts mee, and so high in deed that should I ever fall twould dash mee all to pieces.’ And scribbling in haste as the post boy hollered, William signed off bravely: ‘lett us but escape this cloude, this absence, that has overcast all my contentments and I am confident theres a cleare skye attends us. My dearest deare adieu.’34
Within a month of her father’s death Dorothy had left Chicksands for good. She was expecting to spend the summer between her aunt in London and the household of Sir Thomas Peyton, the husband of her deceased elder sister who had subsequently remarried. Her favourite niece, another Dorothy, and only eleven years y
ounger, would also be there. The aunt Dorothy stayed with in London was probably Katherine, Lady Gargrave, the imperious and interfering sister of her mother, who had already given her the benefit of her trenchant advice on whom she should marry, predictably not the one man of Dorothy’s choosing. Contentious and outspoken on most matters, Lady Gargrave did not rein in her tongue to spare the feelings of her recently orphaned niece: ‘my Aunt told mee … that I was the most willfull woman that ever she knew and had an obstinacy of spirritt nothing could overcome.’35 This could as well have been a description of Lady Gargrave herself, who was not a Danvers for nothing.
Having left Chicksands on 10 April 1654, possibly for the last time, to begin her peripatetic life between various relations, Dorothy first went to a wedding. She travelled to Easton Maudit, a village in Northamptonshire that was part of the Yelverton estate, where her girlhood friend Lady Grey de Ruthin was marrying the twenty-year-old heir, Henry Yelverton. The young bridegroom had given Dorothy a lift there in his own coach. A few days later the newly married couple, Dorothy, her brother Henry and Mr Yelverton’s sister all travelled in a coach to Bedford, from where a neighbour, Lady Briers, collected Dorothy in her coach and took her home for the night before sending her on to St Albans on 20 April. From here she picked up a hackney coach to travel on to London.
Travel was slow, difficult, exhausting and often dangerous. Rich families had their own horses, carriages and staff to care for the animals and maintain and drive the vehicles. But families like the Osbornes had to wait for the generosity of richer friends or hire a hackney. Men would travel on horseback, sometimes for days at a time – a very good horse could manage thirty-five to fifty miles in a day – while women rode more for pleasure in the fields and parks, or out hunting. The more adventurous women, however, made short journeys on horseback. The roads could be treacherous, deeply rutted by the wheels of carriages, heavy agricultural carts and ox-drawn wagons. Generally unmarked, it was easy for an unwary traveller to lose the way and get hopelessly lost. In winter tracks would become impassable with floods and mud streams, and pedestrians and horses risked falling or breaking limbs on the hidden potholes and ridges riven by the hard use and weather. Women of quality did not travel unaccompanied and so had to wait on someone else’s plans before being able to embark on a journey. Anyone travelling alone or even with a companion could fall victim to footpads who preyed specifically on weary travellers on the open road.