by Jane Dunn
According to his sister, William was constantly with Dorothy throughout this long and harrowing time. Family tradition had it that he sat at her bedside smoking a pipe in the hopes that the tobacco would protect him. There was no treatment, yet desperate people demanded that doctors did something to try to help. They fell back on their usual procedures that often weakened an immune system already in crisis: letting blood to try to reduce the fever, administering purgatives to make the patient vomit or evacuate the bowels. William, writing in his old age, showed his deep scepticism about doctors and their stock treatments of disease. How much better, he believed, in the face of ignorance to let the body heal itself:
Yet the usual practice of physic among us runs still the same course, and turns, in a manner, wholly upon evacuation, either by bleeding, vomits, or some sort of purgation; though it be not often agreed among physicians in what cases or what degrees any of these are necessary; nor among other men, whether any of them are necessary or no … it is very probable that nature knows her own wants and times so well, and so easily finds her own relief that way, as to need little assistance, and not well to receive the common violences that are offered her.56
The diarist John Evelyn wrote a description of what it was like to endure a smallpox attack and be subjected to these aggressive treatments that William so doubted. In the early stages he was unable to hold up his head and had to keep to his room ‘imagining that my very eyes would have droped out’. That night his skin was so afflicted with a stinging sensation that he was incapable of sleep. The next day he was in the crisis of his fever and the doctor decided to let some blood, although he admitted later that if he had known it was smallpox he should not have proceeded with that particular course of treatment. Evelyn’s rash arrived the day after that and he was purged by the doctor who then applied leeches* to his skin. Once smallpox was diagnosed he was kept warm in bed for sixteen days. The arrival of the spots had eased his pain somewhat but Evelyn was still ‘infinitly afflicted with the heate & noysomenesse [unpleasantness]’.57 It took five weeks before he considered himself restored to health and able to take up his life again.
Neither Dorothy nor William wrote of this catastrophe that befell them, just at the point when everything they had longed for was in reach. For Dorothy to have survived was the greatest gift: however Martha Temple wrote of her brother’s honesty in admitting to an inevitable sadness at the spoiling of her beauty before he had really had a chance to enjoy it. (He wrote in an essay that the gift of beauty was always more a joy to others than to the beneficiary herself.) Fortunately William and Dorothy had known each other so long through the medium of their letters and had grown so familiar with each other’s thoughts and character that their physical good looks had never been a priority. William had long recognised that Dorothy’s beauty sprang from a deeper source than an unblemished creamy skin and his pain became but a passing regret: ‘He was happy when he saw [her life] secure[,] his kindness haveing greater tyes then that of her beauty though that Loss was too great to leave him wholy insensible,’58 as his young sister Martha never forgot.
The devastation of smallpox was commonplace and yet still shocking. Pepys, on hearing that the celebrated beauty Frances Stuart, darling of Charles II’s court, was suffering from the disease, wrote it was enough to make a man weep to think of such loveliness thus spoiled. Then again, in search of a moral, he considered it perhaps a necessary reminder of ‘the uncertainty of beauty that could be in this age’.59
There seems to have been no hesitation for either Dorothy or William during this further test of their love. Their journey to this point had been so long and fraught that nothing could stop them now, not even the threat of penury. The negotiations and wrangles over her dowry and William’s father’s settlement on the young couple were still unresolved. Just three days before the newly arranged wedding date, Henry and Sir John, William’s father, had such a fiery disagreement that the elder man stalked off saying he could not agree. When Dorothy heard about this last-minute obstruction she too lost her temper with her brother.
However, the marriage banns had been called and the wedding went ahead at last on Christmas Day 1654 in St Giles in the Field, the church between Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. A few months before, Dorothy had written to William of her idea of the ideal wedding, with little fanfare or fuss, and there is no reason to doubt that she managed something equally modest and straightforward: ‘and that was of two person’s whoe had time enough to confesse to contrive it; and noebody to please int but themselves[.] he came downe into the Country where she was upon a Visett and one morning marryed her, as soon as they came out of the Church they took coach and cam for the Towne, dined at an inne by the way and at night cam into Lodgings that were provided for them where nobody knew them and where they passed for marryed People of seven years standing.’ She had been alarmed at a statute passed by the Barebones Parliament that had stated that marriages had to be conducted by a justice of the peace in a civil ceremony, after the posting of the banns: ‘the truth is,’ she admitted, ‘I could not indure to bee Mrs Bride in a Publick [civil] wedding [even] to bee made the happiest person on Earth.’60
Dorothy Osborne became Dorothy Temple and, after all the years of discussion about the necessity of having an appropriate income, they went ahead in the end without any promise of financial security. Rather than stay incognito at some wayside inn on their marriage night, they travelled up to the atmospheric house they both loved, Moor Park in Hertfordshire, where Dorothy’s distant cousin Elizabeth Franklin and her husband Richard lived. To be together at last, without fear of disapproval or discovery, their union sanctioned by marriage, had been the focus of their dreams for years. They liked to compare the vicissitudes of their love to the kind of extravagant romances they enjoyed reading and so it seems appropriate to use William’s own words from one of the stories he elaborated on to entertain himself and Dorothy during their separation, which brings this chapter to its natural conclusion: ‘[they] meet with so many kisses with such tender embraces as the murmuring winds seemd to envy their pleasures, and the silent shades to admire at their loves. but the opportunity was too faire and their long starv’d passion too keen to content itself heer … [she] leads him into her chamber where hee soon finds out the bed and where in complaisance to the lovers wee will for a while draw the curtains about them.’61
* * *
* Fifth Monarchists were active during the interregnum. Based on their interpretation of the prophecies in the Book of Daniel they believed there had already been four empires, Assyrian, Persian, Grecian and Roman, and that the fifth would be a kingdom of God on earth, established by Jesus and ruled over by the saints for 1,000 years. 1666 was a year of particular significance and excitement for the sect as emphasis in the Book of Revelations on the significance of 666 led them to expect 1666 to mark the second coming of Jesus. For a while John Bunyan was among their number.
* The Levellers were a radical movement led by John Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn. They agitated on behalf of Oliver Cromwell and then against him. They believed all men were born free and equal and could claim some natural human rights derived from the will of God. They anticipated the main arguments of the French and American revolutions – but by more than a century and a quarter. Committed republicans, they considered true sovereignty to belong to the people and therefore wide suffrage to be necessary, giving the vote to all men (but sadly not to women).
* In the Osborn family’s possession is a gold ring inscribed inside ‘the love I owe I cannot show’ together with a tortoiseshell guard, both believed to be Dorothy’s.
* Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), historian and Bishop of Salisbury. He began to publish History of the Reformation in 1679 and his lively but partisan History of My Own Time was published after his death.
† Burnet’s editor in the Clarendon Press edition of the History, published at the turn of the twentieth century, was so outraged by this he was moved to add
this ringing defence in a footnote: ‘The author should have done more justice to the character of this truly great man; one of the ablest, most sincere, generous and virtuous ministers, that any age had produced; and who will always be deemed one of the honours of this nation, as a statesman, a writer, and as a lover and example of the finest sorts of learning. They who knew Sir William best, have had a disdain at the misrepresentation here of his principles with regard to religion; his whole life was a continued course of probity, disinterestedness, and every other amiable virtue with every elegancy of it. Great in business and happy out of it. See, and contemplate his writings; but pass gently over his few errors.’
* Humphrey Fysshe was sheriff of Bedford in 1644. Dorothy described him thus: ‘[he] is the Squire of Dames, and has soe many Mistresses that any body may prettend a share in him and bee beleev’d; but though I have the honour to bee his neer neighbour, to speak freely I cannot bragge much that hee makes any Court to mee’.
* Close to £32 in today’s currency.
* Professional performances of plays had been banned in London from September 1642, although some companies risked being raided in continuing to put on clandestine performances or ostensibly private entertainments in various country houses. By 1649 most of the playhouses had been stripped of their fixtures. However the fact that opera performances were still allowed meant that enterprising impresarios staged their plays with music. On 9 July 1660 Charles II issued a royal warrant to Sir William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew to put on professional performances again.
* Leeches are slug-like worms and have been used medicinally for more than 3,000 years. They were in widespread use in the seventeenth century when they were applied to skin in an attempt to reduce the amount of heat in the body and cleanse the blood. The blood-sucking increased blood flow and, not that it was known at the time, also introduced a chemical, hirudin, into the venous system that prevented blood clotting. Leeches are back in favour in some branches of microsurgery where the natural blood circulation is lacking.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Make Haste Home
My dear dear heart make hast home, I doe soe want thee that I cannot imagin how I did to Endure your being soe long away when your businesse was in hande.
Goodnight my dearest, I am Yours D.T.
DOROTHY OSBORNE, letter to William Temple, late 1650s
EVEN IN THE frost of winter Moor Park exerted its charm. Generations loved the house and its setting and wrote lyrically about it, not least William himself who considered it ‘the sweetest place, I think, that I have seen in my life … the remembrance of what it was is too pleasant ever to forget’.1 The grand Palladian mansion (now a conference centre and wedding venue in the middle of a golf course) was built in 1720 with new money made by the entrepreneur Benjamin Styles.* The house where Dorothy and William spent their honeymoon has long gone but the gardens, created by the talented Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford, in the ten years from 1617 until her death, were described and memorialised by William who considered them an exemplar of the best of English gardens.*
It was in these gardens that Dorothy and William walked, admiring the countess’s creation against the distant views of misty water meadows and wooded hills. In his vagabond youth, the Franklins and this house had become for William an emotional focus and centre of renewal and calm. Many years later he was to write what friendship meant to him, perhaps recalling the time of his long lonely courtship: ‘Something like home that is not home, like alone that is not alone, to be wished, and only found in a friend, or in his house’.2
The house was built on a rise with the formal part of the garden descending in grand terraces to a vast parterre, the different levels connected by sweeping flights of wide stone steps. The flagged parterre was geometrically divided into four with intersecting gravel walks, embellished with two fountains and eight statues to intrigue the eye. One of these statues was of Leda and no doubt William would have shown his new wife the melancholy verses he had scratched with a diamond, a few years before, on the window overlooking the statue of the ravished girl. At last he had an answer to the question he had long ago asked the immutable stone: ‘Who is happier you or I’.
There were four summerhouses in this romantic garden, he recalled, and grand stone-arched cloisters providing shady refuge from the heat of summer and dry promenades for when it rained. The lower reaches of the garden became increasingly naturalistic, though in a romantic, fantastical way, with grottoes, ‘water-works’, massive rocks, and meandering pathways through much more verdant planting and ‘wilderness’.3
Grottoes remained immensely popular features in country gardens from the sixteenth century, even up to Victorian times. They were anything from fanciful, watery caves in which streams dribbled and fountains played to elegant outside rooms decorated with shells and scientific mineral collections where guests gathered for drinks and conversation. In years to come Dorothy and William would cultivate a natural grotto in the grounds of their own Moor Park.
William mentioned that the gardens at the original Moor Park were ‘celebrated by Doctor Donne’* and perhaps was thinking of the poem ‘Twickenham Garden’4 about an earlier but similar creation of Lucy Harington’s. The great poet considered her garden to be a cure-all, balm to grief, a true Eden into which he had ‘the serpent brought’. Not wishing to renounce the possibility of love he hoped instead to become a part of this created paradise:
Love, let me
Some senseless piece of this place be:
Make me a mandrake, so I may grow here,
Or a stone fountain weeping out my year.
Here with crystal phials, lovers, come,
And take my tears, which are love’s wine.
William and Dorothy did come as lovers to that place and were never to forget its magic: when they eventually retired to Surrey they named their own house and garden ‘Moor Park’ in homage to it. But lover-like pursuits were soon interrupted by the pressing need to sort out their finances, still left in the balance through the intransigence of brother Henry and the flaring impatience of Sir John Temple, irritated at having to negotiate with a man who had been so consistently antagonistic and defamatory of his son.
More than two years before he died, Sir Peter Osborne had decided on Dorothy’s inheritance and set it at £4,000, to be paid in instalments.* He had informed Dorothy that he had made provision for her and when Henry asked him ‘if it pleased to deliver it to the use of my sister’ the old man had replied, ‘yes with all his [my] heart’, adding, ‘And I pray God … blesses it to her.’5 Given his own confused passions and desire to maintain control, it was understandable that Henry had been reluctant to fulfil this wish. His delaying tacitcs had repercussions, however, for Sir John Temple, already suspicious of him, had angrily refused to make his promised settlement on the couple until the Osborne dowry was secured. This had left Dorothy and William to start married life without visible means of support. Their impecuniousness forced them, just three days after their wedding, to write to Henry requesting the deeds outlining the terms of Dorothy’s father’s agreement and hoping to effect the settlement as soon as possible.
By the following February, they still had no settlement and on Valentine’s Day William and Dorothy were forced to bring the matter to a head by suing Henry for the money owed them, declaring themselves ‘destitute of all provision of livelihood’.6 The bill that was lodged in Chancery also accused Henry of fraud for getting his sister to sign, without reading, a treaty that she thought committed her money to a trust for her use but apparently instead delivered ‘the full interest thereof to his own use’.7
Henry’s answer was interesting in that it indicated not only the predictable but ignoble desire to spoil his sister’s happiness in a marriage he deplored, but also his more businesslike concerns about the extent of the Temple fortune and whether the family could match proportionately the money that Dorothy was bringing to their union. He complained, ‘after several treaties had thereabout
and pretences made of a considerable estate, no satisfaction could be given by them that they, or either of them, could settle upon her any jointure or estate upon her children proportionable to what her portion deserved and to the satisfaction of her friends [himself and the family]’.8 This was the truly mercantile aspect of marriage that Dorothy so despaired of and despised, while acknowledging the practical need for a minimum level of income on which to live in a manner befitting their custom and class.
Still Henry procrastinated and his diary charted the halting progress of the negotiations. The settlement was not finalised until Friday, 20 July 1655, nearly seven months after the couple were married, and when Dorothy was already five months pregnant.
After all those years of frustrated desire and much tested loyalty it was gratifying for them both to find that the long-dreamed-of consummation of their love was crowned with the almost immediate conception of their first baby. There are some pointers as to the kind of married relationship they sought to make. During their courtship Dorothy spent a great deal of time thinking and debating with her friends, her brother and William the various ways that men and women relate to each other. Her letters to William were clear about the qualities and conditions she considered important. Love was a necessity. To marry as society and family demanded, purely for financial gain, Dorothy considered a shameful and self-destructive act. Her distress was clear when she considered how the first woman she had ever looked up to as beautiful, the talented and vivacious Lady Isabella Rich, had debased herself in marrying Sir James Thynne* for his fortune and the grand family seat at Longleat. Dorothy even managed to persuade her brother Henry that she was right in her estimation that the lovely Isabella ‘had better have marryed a begger, then that beast with all his Estate’ and although she felt unhappiness was no excuse for Lady Thynne’s subsequent wild behaviour she had some sympathy for her plight: ‘certainly they run a strange hazard that have such husbands as makes them think they cannot bee more undon whatever course they take, O tis ten thousand pitty’s … what should she doe with beauty now.’9