Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  The secure monotony of Dorothy’s days at home in rural seclusion was abruptly interrupted and she was suddenly thrust into company that was not of her choosing, at the mercy of every opinionated matron or self-satisfied gallant. She complained to William she was not allowed time for anything, jollied into a continual social round: ‘to show how absolutely I am governed I need but tell you that I am every night in the park and at new spring garden where though I come with a mask I cannot scape being knowne nor my conversation being admired.’ She added, teasing William, ‘are not you in some fear what will become on mee[?] these are dangerous Courses’,36 and then signing off that she was as unchanged as ever in her feelings for him.

  The Spring Garden Dorothy was visiting nightly during the early summer of 1654 was a popular meeting place in London, ‘the usual rendezvous for the Ladys & Galants at this season’,37 and the first alfresco entertainment in London. It was an enclosure at the northeast corner of St James’s Park and possibly took its name from a mechanically controlled fountain that sprinkled any who approached the sundial, to the amusement of all. The Spring Garden became known in the middle of the seventeenth century for the provision of wine or ale and a cold collation, a light meal of fruit, meats and other delicacies, costing about 6 shillings.* It was a magnet for the middle-aged and young alike, sometimes on their way back from Hyde Park where horse and chariot races were a great attraction, but where there were no official ready-cooked food outlets. However, the shady paths of Spring Garden, the availability of alcohol and the crowds who frequented it late into the night inevitably attracted a reputation for disreputable goings-on.

  Lady Halkett, a spirited contemporary, keen to prove how innocent she was of any improper behaviour and just as anxious as Dorothy to safeguard her reputation, wrote in her memoirs: ‘though I loved well to see plays and to walke in the Spring Garden sometimes (before itt grew something scandalous by the abuse of some), yett I cannott remember 3 times that ever I wentt with any man besides my brothers; and if I did, my sisters or others better then my selfe was with mee.’38 No doubt the scandalous abuse by some involved the usual fornicating, drunkenness, thieving and gambling: Cromwell, taking seriously his God-directed role as lord protector, temporarily closed the garden shortly after Dorothy’s evening visits.

  With all this unaccustomed socialising Dorothy found herself blushing every time William’s name was mentioned and hated how much this revealed to prying eyes. ‘A blush is the foolishest thing that can bee,’ she wrote to the cause of them, ‘and betray’s one more than a red nose dos a drunkerd.’39 But she preferred to blush and be betrayed, she said, than, with experience or cynicism, remain pale and unaffected. The fact that William Temple was being mentioned regularly in relation to her showed just how generally accepted their engagement had become. William’s father had got such a fright at the mental state of his son when faced with losing Dorothy that he had promised William he would not thwart his love: ‘hee would never give mee occasion of any discontents which hee could remedy.’40 There were no longer any great obstacles to their marriage and their correspondence was much less fraught with anxiety and fear of loss.

  Only the marriage settlement remained to be negotiated and as it was hammered out between Sir John Temple and Dorothy’s brothers this inevitably caused its own problems, given the legacy of the violent opposition of her brother Henry and the ill-judged criticisms from Sir John of Dorothy’s character. She, grateful for his generosity to Henry, reminded William that even if her brother misbehaved he must never forget that what mattered was her own enduring love: ‘I will not Oblige you to Court a person that has injured you, I only beg that whatsoever hee dos in that kinde may bee Excused by his relation to mee, and that whensoever you are moved to think hee dos you wrong, you will at the same time remember his sister Loves you passionatly & nobly that if hee Valew’s nothing but fortune shee dispises it and could Love you as much a begger as she could doe a Prince, and shall without question Love you Etternally.’41

  Dorothy knew she would love him as much if he were but a beggar but the pragmatic side of her understood how the world worked and recognised the necessary good sense in obtaining a settlement from William’s father that would enable them to live without embarrassment in the manner to which they were both accustomed. She saw it as a matter of honour too to show her family and her friends that she was properly valued by the family she was about to join. ‘To all persons some proportion of fortune is necessary according to theire severall qualitys’: so began her argument, explaining that if she was to lose a fortune she would adjust to her new situation as well as anyone. It would be folly, however, to deny the need for a modest fortune to begin with, just because she was in love with the man she was to marry. ‘I may bee justly reproached that I deceived my self when I Expected to bee at all Valewed in a famely that I am a Stranger to or that I should bee consider’d with any respect because I had a Kindenesse for you that made mee not Valew my owne interest.’ Should William’s father agree to a reasonable settlement on their marriage then she would be happy, she wrote, to trust herself entirely to him: ‘you should dispose mee as you pleased, carry mee whither you would[,] all places of the world would bee alike to mee where you were.’42

  Both William and Dorothy found it hard to adjust to the dawning reality that their long courtship and the secrecy and struggle against sometimes overwhelming odds were over. Dorothy’s natural disposition to feel that anything she really desired might be snatched from her kept her wary. The fact that their fates were now united either doubled the cause for worry, or halved it, she was not quite sure which: ‘I durst [once dared] trust your ffortune alone rather then now that mine is Joyned with it, yet I hope yours may bee soe good as to overcome the ill of mine.’43 But William also found this new reality almost as unsettling as the old. He wrote in one of his stories at the time of his hero’s feelings when fortune suddenly turns and offers the chance at last of ‘possessing a good they had long had in pursuite … his joyes are as wakefull as his griefs used to bee, and hee is equally impatient in them both’. William, in philosophical mode, explained, ‘so fantastical is our composure [nature] that the expectation of pleasure is a trouble as well as the apprehension of pain’.44 When caged lions are set free they are at first frightened by the sky; so too for Dorothy and William, their natural hopes and feelings having been so strictly curtailed by others, freedom brought its own fears.

  Dorothy still had to endure another bout of intensive family life as she set off at the end of June to travel, first down the Thames to Gravesend, then on to her brother-in-law’s house in Kent. Knowlton Court was a rambling manor house, largely Elizabethan, with 300 acres of parkland on the outskirts of the village of Knowlton, nine miles from Canterbury and five miles from the coast. From Dorothy’s letters it appeared to be constantly full of visitors ‘the most filled of any since the Arke’,45 largely due to the forceful and extrovert character of Sir Thomas Peyton’s second wife, Cecelia, previously the widow of a mayor of London and a generous-hearted, game-playing, exuberant woman of staggering energy.

  On many occasions Dorothy was encouraged to play cards with the rest of the house party right through the night and only managed to escape to bed when the sun was up. ‘Wee goe abroade all day and Play all night and say our Prayers when wee have time,’ she wrote to William, desperate for his arrival to rescue her from such a life: ‘in sober Earnest now I would not live thus a twelve month to gaine all that the K. [Charles II in exile] has lost unlesse it were to give it him againe; tis a mirracle to mee how my B.[Sir Thomas Peyton] indures it tis as contreary to his humor as darknesse is to light and only shew’s the Power hee lets his wife have over him[.] will you bee soe good natured[?]’46

  Her own want of good nature was on her mind at the time, so irritated was she by some of the company she was forced to keep. There had been Lady Tollemache in London who had rattled on about how her remarkable willpower had saved her from the scourge of smallpox even as the p
ustules were erupting on her body, and then gave twenty other instances of her force of reason subduing the elements. In Kent the household seemed to be in constant party mood, ‘soe strangly Crowded with Company that I am weary as a dog’.47 This was a huge strain for a naturally introspective and thoughtful woman like Dorothy who was hard pressed even to get enough privacy to write to William in peace. She was befriended by a woman whose marriage had so disappointed her that she took every occasion to speak sourly of all men and any union with them, thus alienating the young men in the house party. Dorothy found herself laughed at for insisting that her marriage would be one where ‘our kindnesse should increase every day, if it were possible’,48 but she was dismayed by the evidence all around her of the sad opposite.

  Increasingly she found herself drawn to her eldest niece Dorothy, a beautiful and serious young woman who had stayed with her at Chicksands when a child. A chronically depressed young man also attached himself to her; his fiancée had died just as they were due to be married and Dorothy felt he had never recovered from his anguish, ‘though tis many year’s since, one may read it in his face still’. Another seven guests and their servants turned up to stay at Knowlton Court, the men terrific drinkers, and Dorothy all the more desperately longed for escape.

  However there was one person to be pitied more than herself, she claimed, a young woman whose fate gave a glimpse of what awaited so many women with little power over their lives or whom they married. Joanna was the nineteen-year-old daughter of the royalist Sir Bevil Grenville who had been killed, after a heroic stand at the Battle of Lansdown near Bath in 1643, when she was a girl of eight. She had been married to a rough old soldier, Colonel Thornhill. Dorothy’s unerring eye noticed the inequality in the marriage and, wanting something so different for herself, grieved for the commonplace subjection of this young wife: ‘as pritty a Young Woman as I have seen. [She] has all [her brother’s] good Nature, with a great deal of beauty and modesty and witt enough, this innocent Creature is sacrifised to the veryest beast that ever was’. Dorothy had felt outraged on Joanna’s behalf because her husband, who was due to travel with her, had instead sent her on alone promising to catch up later. However, he fell in with an old acquaintance and did not turn up until the next night, and then much the worse for drink, ‘soe drunk that hee was layed imediatly to bed whither she was to ffollow him when she had supped’.49

  The enforced communality of life in a crowded and noisy household like this at Knowlton was impossible to avoid. Dorothy had already been there three months and her patience was often tested to the limit. People lived with very little privacy, bedrooms were shared, sometimes beds too. It was summer and washing facilities at the time were primitive: the air was filled with the pungent smells of sweating bodies, damp unwashed clothes, curing meat and boiled cabbage, human and animal excrement, the bad breath of illness and tooth decay, and the close proximity of steaming horses and muddy dogs. There was an earthy intimacy to life and everyone was involved in the merry round of eating, drinking, playing games and noisy argument. Dorothy entered into it all but longed for some peace and space of her own: ‘Would to god I had all that good Nature you complaine you have too much of,’ she wrote in exasperation to William, ‘I could finde wayes Enough to dispose ont amongst myself and my friend’s.’50

  The household put on a play while Dorothy was there, The Lost Lady by William Berkeley, whose talents more naturally inclined him to being the agriculturist and administrator he became as colonial governor of Virginia. This play was a tragicomedy and Dorothy was deputed to play the leading part, the Lost Lady herself, one Milesia-Acanthe, who had to appear disguised as Acanthe the Moorish sorceress and also as her own ghost. ‘Pray God it bee not an ill Omen,’51 she wrote in jest to William. With the reopening of theatres after the restoration,* the play was given a wider audience once more (it was first published in 1638). Samuel Pepys saw it twice some years later. Not caring for it the first time, he was particularly put out by being spotted by four clerks from his office who, to his chagrin, were sitting in better seats than his. Surprisingly he went a second time and found the play improved on acquaintance, although his enjoyment this time was possibly enhanced more by an unexpected interchange with a beautiful young woman sitting in the row in front of him: ‘I sitting behind in a dark place, a lady spat backward upon me by mistake, not seeing me. But after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all.’52

  Dorothy had no alternative but to endure the summer of enforced socialising and jollity and news of William’s imminent arrival could not come soon enough. At the beginning of September she knew he was on his way at last bearing his father’s consent and that nothing now stood between them and happiness. However, his having to trust himself to the open sea brought its own anxieties and her fellow guests at Knowlton, itself so close to the coast, thought her unusually neurotic about the weather: ‘Every litle storme of winde fright’s me soe that I passe heer for the greatest Coward that ever was borne.’53

  Sir John Temple’s initial doubt of her depth of feelings and loyalty to his son still rankled and Dorothy reiterated her contempt for the usual mercenary approach to marriage: ‘I would faine tell you though that your f[ather] is mistaken and you are not if you beleeve that I have all the Kindenesse and Tendernesse for you my heart is capable of, Let mee assure you (what ere your f[ather] thinks) that had you £10000 a year I could love you noe more then I doe.’54

  Dorothy instructed William to come to meet her at Knowlton at the beginning of October; she urgently needed to see and speak to him and was impatient with Lady Peyton’s indecisiveness over their forthcoming journey to London. For some unspecified reason, however, she declared William could only stay for a few hours – she would tell him why when they met.

  By 17 October 1654, Dorothy had finally left the social whirl at Knowlton and travelled up to London with Cecelia Peyton. She had supper with brother Henry and once more ‘declared that shee would marry Temple’55 as he wrote in his diary, the grinding of his teeth almost audible. That night Dorothy and Lady Peyton stayed at Honnybuns in Drury Lane. However, there was someone in the house suffering from smallpox and so they moved on to a similar establishment in Queens Street.

  During their years of enforced separation, Dorothy and William had most feared that death, through accident or disease, would suddenly rush in and separate them for ever. Now one week before their proposed wedding day in October, Dorothy fell ill. William’s sister Martha wrote: ‘the misfortunes of this amour were not yet ended’. Dorothy’s health took such a dramatic downward turn that Martha recalled the doctors despaired of her life. The early stages of smallpox manifested in a sudden onset of high fever, general prostration, possible encephalitis, with severe headache and backache, sometimes pain in the limbs and abdomen with violent vomiting. Dorothy must have had many of these extreme symptoms because the doctors were so concerned at her condition that they considered she stood a better chance of surviving if in fact she did have smallpox, rather than any even more deadly disease, like the fevers and mysterious catastrophic infections that killed people in a matter of days.

  To hope for smallpox showed how seriously ill she was. Those first few days of uncertainty can only have been desperate for William who was at her bedside almost constantly. Smallpox was the major epidemic disease in western Europe at this time. Everyone knew at least someone who had died from an attack: those who survived were more than likely to be disfigured for life. Death claimed about a third of the sufferers of common smallpox and usually followed complications such as bacterial infections of the lesions, pneumonia or bone infections. However there was an even more severe form of haemorrhagic smallpox where massive bleeding from the skin lesions and from the mouth, nose and other organs of the body, such as the kidney and spleen, meant the fatality rate was almost total.

  If the patient did not die almost immediately, it took some days for any disease to manifest itself fully. With smallpox, minute reddish spots
appeared on the mucous membrane of the mouth after about three days of fever and then the characteristic raised rash spread over the whole face, the torso and finally the hands and feet. Within another two or three days these spots became blisters filled with an opalescent fluid, often enlarging into a great mass distorting the patient’s features. If Dorothy’s smallpox had been of the haemorrhagic type then she would probably have been dead within five or six days of the rash appearing. Fortunately her attack was the regular form of the virus, when two weeks into the illness the smallpox pustules increased in size and began to grow a crust. At this point if there were no complications the patient’s fever should have retreated and her temperature returned to normal. Those anxiously nursing Dorothy would begin to relax for the first time, able to believe at last that she could survive. Within a month, most of the scabs would have fallen off leaving pale pitted scars behind. These might become less noticeable in time but, tragically for many women particularly, the skin’s natural smoothness and translucency had gone.