Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  Dorothy felt that to marry for love promised a greater chance of happiness, but this had to be tempered by good financial sense, not merely an expression of whim or ‘Giddy humour’10 as she called it. Interestingly, she thought the financial settlement that a man or woman brought to a marriage in some pernicious way affected their status in the eyes of the world. With this consideration she felt her lack of fortune diminished William as his did her, and was outraged that the news that she intended to marry him, poor as he was, so lowered her market value that it encouraged impoverished upstarts to court her when previously they had not the temerity even to think they had a chance. William, of course, argued from a more scientific viewpoint that a marriage of mutual attraction was more ‘natural’ and so any offspring would be healthier than those produced by artificial matings propelled by other less heartfelt considerations.

  Dorothy saw the conduct and condition of a marriage to be more the woman’s responsibility than the man’s. In her experience women were more critical than their easy-going men and more often stirrers of domestic strife. Clever wives could get most husbands to do what they wanted, or at least mitigate the effects of what they did not want, through patience, subtlety and good humour. ‘This is an ill doctrine for mee to preach,’ she admitted, ‘but to my friends I cannot but confesse that I am affrayde much of the fault lyes in us, for I have observed that Generaly in great famely’s the Men sildom disagree, but that the women are always scolding, and tis most certain that lett the husband bee what hee will if the wife have but patience (which sure becoms her best) the disorder cannot bee great enough to make a noise. His anger alone when it meet’s with nothing that resists it cannot bee loude enough to disturbe the Neighbours.’

  There seems to have been as lively an interest in celebrity gossip in the seventeenth century as there is in the twenty-first. At her most sparkling, Dorothy speculated on the marital difficulties of the Leicesters* to elaborate on the widespread effects when a husband, in this case the Earl of Leicester, after nearly forty years of domination by his wife (not a good thing in Dorothy’s book) decided to assert himself: ‘Meethinks hee wakes out of his long sleep like a froward Childe that wrangles and fights with all that com’s neer it, they say hee has turned away almost every servant in the house and left her at Penshurst to disgest it as she can.’11 The doings of the Leicesters were of particular interest to Dorothy and William, for it was at Penshurst rectory that William had spent his happiest years as a boy and their son Henry was a particular friend. Out of the discussion of the struggles of others came a philosophy of practical living for herself. How much less unsettling for everyone it would have been, so Dorothy implied, if in the case of the Leicesters, for instance, the balance of power between husband and wife had been sooner addressed and more equitably negotiated.

  While Dorothy argued the general principle that women in marriage should be, if not submissive then certainly wily, patient and long-suffering, her personal messages to William were clear in her desire for something altogether different. She wanted above all an equal partnership with him and admitted to an unwillingness to conform her character to some more anodyne ideal. Owning up, before they were married, to wilfulness, obstinacy of spirit and a need ‘to speak what I think’,12 she explained, ‘I make it a case of consciens to discover my faults to you as fast as I know them,’ adding, tongue in cheek, ‘Take heed you see I give you faire warning.’13

  All the etiquette books of the time stressed a wife’s subordinate role. Certainly the Church and the law gave her very few rights. The intellectual and humane Lord Halifax saw the seventeenth-century wife’s role more as a back-seat driver, employing not criticism and command but instead an airy delight in the view and gentle directions that concealed her own will and concerns. In advice to his much loved daughter Elizabeth on how to deal with a range of difficult men with dreadful habits, he sorrowfully pointed out how counter-productive confrontation and complaint would prove, for instance, in the face of a husband’s sexual unfaithfulness: ‘Be assured that in these cases your discretion and silence will be the most prevailing reproof; and affected ignorance, which is seldom a virtue, is a great one here. And when your husband sees how unwilling you are to be uneasy, there is no stronger argument to persuade him not to be unjust to you.’ Ever positive, he suggested that such self-effacing behaviour would even win back her husband’s loyalty in the long run: ‘There is nothing so glorious to a wife as a victory so gained; a man so reclaimed is for ever after subjected to her virtue, and her bearing for a time is more than rewarded by a triumph that will continue as long as her life.’14 Helpfully, but rather depressingly, his advice continued to catalogue equally pacific approaches to a husband who was one, or all, of the following: a drunkard, a bully, unromantic and indifferent, a miser and, lastly, a weak and incompetent ass.

  It was all very wise advice to any woman of the time since once she was married she had to make her life as satisfactory as she could, for to walk out was to face the loss of her children, her fortune, social position and future prospects.

  In principle Dorothy might have found much to commend in Halifax’s approach; however, in all things to do with individual lives and the negotiation necessary in living those lives, the reality of each relationship was as varied as the people within it. Dorothy, for sure, was not discreet and silent in her dealings with William. She was confident of his love and demanding in what she needed from him. ‘I doe not care for a devided heart,’ she told him once. ‘I must have all or none, at least the first place in it.’15 But she was clever and subtle too and realised, for instance, the necessity of getting on well with her new family-in-law. From the moment she met William’s fond sister Martha, a young woman of much character and strong opinions, and even Sir John Temple, who had angered her by questioning her loyalty and staying power, it was evident she charmed them all. With modesty and sensitivity she integrated herself into the household: Martha recalled her surprise at how well she fitted in, ‘so unusual in other Famelys, that [William’s] lady fell into it as naturally, as if she had bin borne there’.16

  There are fewer indications as to William’s views on marriage, although plenty as to his character and disposition. His father’s devotion to his mother, long after her death, was the stuff of family legend and certainly William had proved his remarkable loyalty and emotional consistency during a protracted and frustrating courtship. His father was a dominating and not always encouraging influence, but William was his much loved eldest son and heir, which gave him a certain responsibility and status. He was naturally easy-going, sensual and amorous and not particularly dogmatic or proud. After the tragedy, commonplace at the time, of his mother’s death when he was only eleven, William was schooled with tolerance and love by his uncle and cared for by an indulgent grandmother. He was early surrounded by exceptional intellectual stimulation, affection and praise. His remarkable good looks and physical vitality can only have added to his air of health, confidence and happy self-esteem.

  William’s persuasive charm, when he chose to exert it, was well known: ‘some have observ’d that he never had a mind to make any body kind to him that he did not compass it,’17 his sister Martha recalled. She also relayed a compliment paid to him by the influential Sir John Percival,* while they were in the Irish parliament together, pointing out his effective eloquence and passion in debate: Sir John had said ‘that he was glad he was not a Woman, because he was sure he might have perswaded him to any thing’.18 No doubt this kind of good-hearted masculine banter was rewarded with a great deal of laughter from the other members and some satisfaction to William himself, who reported the exchange to his wife and sister. But it also implied a criticism that had been made of William before and would be again: that he was too open-minded and not committed enough to one ideological, religious or partisan point of view.

  In one of William’s early essays, he recalled a similar charge brought against Socrates with much greater force, that ‘hee was guilty of the most
pernicious art that was practis’d in the State, wch was by the force of his witt and eloquence to perswade men what hee plese’d, to make truth seeme falsehood and falsehood truth, good evill and evill good’. William was with Socrates in his defence: ‘indeed there is nothing so purely good that a luxurious witt and fancy is not able to veile over with a shade of ill, and nothing so simply evill that it cannot varnish with some shine or gloss of good,’ but recognising a certain facility to this argument he added, ‘tis true this like a picture is to be examin’d onely at a distance.’19

  Not only did he have persuasive force in the debating chamber and warmth and unpredictable charm at home, William also seemed to have the kind of sexual energy that matched his virile cavalier demeanour, as was clear from his ill-advised boast to Laurence Hyde of his youthful sexual appetites and stamina. Martha, as an old lady, looked back on the character of her brother and agreed, that in the past, ‘Hee had bin a passionate lover’; but added the qualities that she had seen at first hand: ‘[he] was a kind Husband, a fond and indulgent Father, & the best friend in the World & the most constant’.20

  We can be certain that Dorothy came to her marriage a virgin and, from the manners and mores of the day, we can be almost as certain that William did not. Uncle Francis Osborne’s famous advice to a son took for granted that young men abroad would have adventures with various women but was full of dire warnings against allowing lust to distort judgement and duty and, heaven forbid, lead a young man to marry his courtesan. Marriages based on emotion were bound for catastrophe.

  There were a few hasty undated notes from Dorothy that exist from the period after her marriage and all show her continued affection, charm of expression and desire for William’s presence. They lack the leisurely descriptions, sharp character sketches and philosophical debates that so animated those of their courtship when she had time on her hands and the urgent desire to maintain in her absence the enchantment of her company. She was now in the happy position of being a busy, pregnant wife, with William mostly by her side and securely hers at last.

  One note may well date from this first pregnancy in the late summer of 1655 when William was up in London dealing with some family business. Addressing him now ‘My Dearest Heart’, she thanked him for the baskets of grapes he had just sent her and assured him that she would be able to find a midwife in the town when her time came. She signed off with ‘I wish … my dearest home again with his D. Temple’.21

  The sexual side of married life was addressed with emotional insight and human understanding by Dorothy’s favourite theologian, Jeremy Taylor, himself a married man with children. In his popular and influential book, recently published in 1650, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living, he offered advice of a remarkably moderate and psychologically astute kind where he accepted the moral expression of sexual desire to extend far wider than merely the procreation of children:

  He is an ill husband that uses his wife as a man treats a harlot, having no other end but his pleasure. Concerning which our best rule is, that although in this, as in eating and drinking, there is an appetite to be satisfied, which cannot be done without pleasing that desire; yet since that desire and satisfaction was intended by nature for other ends, they should never be separate from those ends, but always be joined with all or one of these ends, with a desire of children, or to avoid fornication, or to lighten and ease the cares and sadnesses of household affairs, or to endear each other; but never with a purpose, either in act or desire, to separate the sensuality from these ends which hallow it.22

  Dorothy and William had left Moor Park and spent the year with relations in the country. They stayed with Mary Hammond and her three daughters who lived in Reading, probably at the house of Mary’s widowed mother-in-law, Elizabeth. Mary had herself been widowed the previous year when her husband and William’s cousin, the distinguished parliamentarian soldier Colonel Robert Hammond, whom Dorothy and William had confronted in their life-changing meeting on the Isle of Wight, died of a fever in Ireland. It was further proof of how much stronger the bonds of family could be than the political loyalties that had divided a country in civil war. Colonel Hammond had fought on the opposing side from the Osborne family in a conflict that had claimed two of Dorothy’s brothers, he had been the jailer of the king, and the butt of Robert Osborne’s seditious graffiti, yet Dorothy and William were to start their married life together happily with his widow under his mother’s roof.

  The continuing loss of young family members was painfully brought home to them both when news came through of the death of William’s twenty-year-old brother James. He had thrown in his lot with the parliamentarians and had sailed at the end of 1654 with General Venables,* commander of the land forces in Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’ against Spanish territories in the West Indies. James Temple, along with twenty other officers and men, was killed in the disastrous attack on Hispaniola (San Domingo), although Venables’s force managed to regroup and capture the less strategically important Jamaica. James died on 17 April, having landed just four days previously after four months at sea on a wintry and dangerous passage. He was six weeks short of his twenty-first birthday. Wars had claimed three brothers now in their immediate family, just as Dorothy and William were conscious of the fragile new life they had created and had to bring into an uncertain world.

  A second undated letter of Dorothy’s probably belongs to the period just before their baby was born: ‘Dearest Heart, Tom [who looked after the horses] will give you an account of his Journy to Moore Parke and I can only tell you that wee are all well hear and that you need not presse Mrs Carter [probably the midwife] to come downe yet for my Aunt [Elizabeth Hammond] is of Opinion as well as I that I shall not come soe soon.’ Her characteristic wit showed its old form as she related what visitors had said on finding William away from home: ‘both sayed you were an arrant Gadder therfor I would advise you to make what hast home you can to save your Creditt but most because you know how welcom you will bee to Your D. Temple.’23

  Their first child was born in Reading on 18 December 1655.* They called him John. Not surprisingly this was a name that was significant in both families, where his paternal grandfather, two maternal great-grandfathers, two uncles and a great-uncle were all named John. William and Dorothy had not only managed to produce the son and heir, a John Temple for the new generation, their precious son was Sir John Temple’s first grandchild.

  Parenthood in the gentry and aristocratic classes of seventeenth-century England was generally a hands-off affair, particularly for fathers. But as in their marriage partnership, Dorothy and William seem not to have followed the norm. It was unlikely that they handed John over full-time to a nurse, for very quickly they had given him the fond nickname of ‘Little Creeper’ which showed an early familiarity and affectionate bond, perhaps dating from when he was crawling between six months and a year. Or indeed by ‘creeper’ they could have been recalling an even earlier stage of babyhood with the infant’s tendency to cling like a vine.

  Both Dorothy and William were opinionated about most things and Dorothy in her letters to William expressed a great deal of her family values. In the time that she was living at Knowlton in Kent with her brother-in-law Sir Thomas Peyton and his new family, she was dismayed to see how a good man, known for his humanity and amiable nature, nevertheless treated his excellent wife with scant regard: ‘hee has certainly as great a kindenesse for her as can bee and to say truth not without reason but of all the People that ever I saw I doe not like his Carriage towards her; hee is perpetualy wrangling and findeing fault and to a Person that did not know him would apeare the worst husband and the most imperious in the world.’

  His harsh attitude to his small son, Thomas, who was less than eight years old at the time (and in fact did not live to adulthood), distressed her more: ‘hee is [as critical] amongst his Children too though hee loves them passionatly[.] hee has one son and tis the finest boy that ere you saw and has a notable spirritt but yet stands in that awe of hi
s Father that one word from him is as much as twenty whippings.’24 Dorothy’s heartfelt denunciation of Sir Thomas’s conduct as a husband and father left William in no doubt that she expected him to be very different in these roles himself.

  Luckily William seemed to be in absolute agreement. His natural disposition and the example of his pacific uncle made him a very different kind of father from his contemporaries. His hero Montaigne, in his essay ‘Of the Affection of Fathers to their Children’, explained his unusually kind upbringing (in this respect very similar to William’s) and how this influenced his thoughts. Given William’s respect for Montaigne’s Essays, this passage was almost certainly read by him, reinforcing his own unorthodox views on fatherhood:

  In my first age I never felt the rod but twice, and then very slightly. I practised the same method with my children, who all of them died at nurse, except Leonora, my only daughter, and who arrived at the age of five years and upward without other correction for her childish faults … than words only, and those very gentle … I should, in this, have yet been more religious [been even more gentle] towards the males, as less born to subjection and more free; and I should have made it my business to fill their hearts with ingenuousness and freedom. I have never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more cowardly, or more wilfully obstinate.25

  Much later, when William was more experienced in the trials and joys of parenthood, he wrote an essay on the nature of government where he likened the best kind of king to a pater patriae, the father of his country, and in his elaboration of this analogy he described his ideal of fatherhood (and an unusually benign and altruistic idea of the state):