by Jane Dunn
For if we consider a man multiplying his kind by the birth of many children, and his cares by providing even necessary food for them, till they are able to do it for themselves … if we consider not only the cares, but the industry he is forced to, for the necessary sustenance of his helpless brood … if we suppose him disposing with discretion and order whatever he gets among his children, according to each of their hunger or need, sometimes laying up for to-morrow what was more than enough for to-day, at other times pinching [denying] himself, rather than suffering any of them should want; and as each of them grows up, and able to share in the common support, teaching him both by lesson and example, what he is now to do as the son of this family, and what hearafter as the father of another; instructing them all, what qualities are good, and what are ill, for their health and life, or common society … cherishing and encouraging dispositions to the good; disfavouring and punishing those to the ill; and lastly, among the various accidents of life, lifting up his eyes to Heaven, when the earth affords him no relief; and having recourse to a higher and a greater nature, whenever he finds the frailty of his own.26
In May 1656 Dorothy and William travelled with John, now five months old, to Dublin to introduce Dorothy and their baby to William’s father and sister Martha. This new young family was to live in Ireland for more than six years but by the time they arrived it was a land full of ghosts. It had been devastated by the worst kinds of civil war, gang violence and savage judicial and military retribution. The Irish and their settler neighbours were scattered, their lives and land lost to systematic brutality, internecine murder, and the subsequent catastrophes of dispossession, deportation, famine and plague.
One of Cromwell’s trusted colonels, Richard Lawrence, had been sent over in 1651 with ‘a Regiment of Twelve hundred Foot Men, for the planting and guarding of the City of Waterford, and Towns of Ross and Carwick, with other Places adjacent’. He was subsequently to become governor of Waterford, a good two days’ ride south of Dublin. In 1655, just a year before Dorothy and William were settling around Carlow, he wrote an account of the extent of the destruction of countryside and community that he had witnessed two years earlier. It appeared to have shocked even this battle-hardened soldier: ‘the plague and famine had so swept away whole counties that a man might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature, either man, beast or bird, they being all dead or had quit those desolate places.’ At night vast areas of the countryside were silent and pitch black without any flickering light or plume of smoke from a fire as sign of habitation. What few people there were left were very old men and women with small children, all afflicted by terrible famine. ‘I have seen those miserable creatures plucking stinking, rotten carrion out of a ditch, black and rotten, and been credibly informed that they had dug corpses out of the grave to eat.’27
William and Dorothy arrived in Ireland in the aftermath of one of the worst periods of Anglo-Irish history, one whose malign effects would poison the subsequent centuries. The Irish had long been a problem to England. Beyond the Pale, the boundary of about twenty miles’ radius round Dublin inside which the English crown had some real jurisdiction and the English could live much as they might at home, Ireland was alien, intractable and dangerous as a springboard for invasion by powers hostile to England. The isolation of those within the Pale reinforced notions of English honour and allowed a detachment from the harsh treatment of those beyond. The Tudors began settling small communities of English in an attempt at anglicising and pacifying the island. Irish landowners tended not to have formal deeds to their land, holding their estates through might reinforced by tradition, and so they were forced by successive English governments to relinquish up to a third of their holdings in order to be granted legal title to the rest. That land was released for settlement or ‘plantation’ by the English, Welsh and Scots, as was land confiscated as punishment for rebellion.
Inevitably there were multiple causes for long-simmering hatreds, fear and violence between the communities as well as some successful assimilations through marriage and commercial alliances. Independent settlers also arrived in the early 1600s from France and the Netherlands, many of whom established themselves in Dublin as bankers and financiers. However, differences in religion and language tended to reinforce the separateness of the rival communities. The Irish were Roman Catholic and spoke Irish Gaelic and the incomers were largely English-speaking Protestants. By the early 1640s it was estimated that there were about 125,000 Protestant settlers in Ireland to 1.75 million Irish Catholics.
The resentments against the settlers were brought to a head by Charles I’s lord deputy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth,* and his aggressive investigation of insecure land titles and seizure of what estates he could for crown and Church to distribute and ‘plant’ with their own favourites. After a poor harvest in 1641, long-nurtured hatreds exploded in October with indiscriminate murderous attacks by the Irish on settlers, especially in Ulster. Those who were not killed fled into the defended towns and plague and famine took their further terrible toll. This was when William’s father, Sir John Temple, was in Ireland and his subsequent book on the rebellion, published in 1646, with its affecting and authoritative first-hand accounts of atrocities against the settlers, together with other partisan reports and lurid rumour, exaggerated the number of dead and the extent of the horrors committed. Whatever the real figures, thousands of settlers were murdered and tens of thousands subsequently died as a result of the forced flight from their homes.
The following years of bloody factional fighting and general anarchy led Cromwell to turn his energies to the problem of restoring peace and godliness to Ireland, but this time with the threat of overwhelming force. Parliament had already signed the Adventurers Act in 1642 that set out to pay their creditors with confiscated Irish land. If this land was to be worth anything and Ireland was to become a peaceful and productive part of a united kingdom then security and order had to prevail. In 1649 Cromwell set out with an army of 3,000 Ironsiders and, debilitated with seasickness, landed near Dublin in August. His health was not good and the old soldier was weary, but inspired still with religious zeal. In his eyes, the English and Scottish settlers, the investors who had been promised land, his soldiers whose wages would be paid with land, even the Irish themselves, could not prosper without peace and Protestantism.
His nine-month campaign was swift but turned so brutal that peace and godliness got trampled in blood and dust. In a decade of violence and atrocities, Cromwell’s treatment of the rebels and the innocent civilians caught in their wake was etched deep and traumatically into the country’s psyche. After refusing to surrender to Cromwell and his troops, the town of Drogheda was besieged and, as was the expected punishment for such resistance, sacked. The armed rebels and many of the unarmed inhabitants were murdered, with no quarter given. Perhaps 3,000 people perished during that terrible day and night. Cromwell excused the bloodshed as a painful necessity both to avenge the massacres of the settlers during the rebellion of 1641 and as an exercise in shock and awe that would discourage further resistance, saving the country from continued ‘effusion of blood’. Writing to parliament, Cromwell explained from his own fanatical viewpoint the breaking of the siege: ‘I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.’28
Certainly with the terrible warning of Drogheda, elaborated upon in the telling, other rebel towns quickly surrendered. Wexford, an important port on the south-east corner of Ireland, however, presented a more complicated picture with the town choosing peace but the military governor optimistic he could put up a fight. A confused tale of prolonged negotiations, double-dealing and betrayal was brought to a terrifying end with Cromwell’s troops suddenly storming the town and then losing control in a bloody rampage t
hat killed about 1,500 of the town’s inhabitants. The sackings and massacres at these two towns earned Cromwell his lasting infamy in the history of Ireland. The stories of the atrocities encouraged the hardening of attitudes and antagonisms among the Catholics: the Protestants already had fuelled their own fear and hatreds with the stories of Catholic barbarity during the rebellion of 1641. Both communities were left with many wounds to pick.
By the end of May 1650, just over nine months since he had first arrived in Ireland intent on rooting out the last of royalist and Catholic resistance, Cromwell returned to England, leaving the Irish problem to his close collaborator and son-in-law, Henry Ireton.* Ireton argued for greater leniency towards the Irish in the hopes of shortening the war, but after a few more bloodless surrenders he mishandled the campaign at Limerick where the town held out for a year. This was to prove the death of Ireton. An intellectual and a fine, tough soldier, he had survived wounding and capture during the hard-fought civil wars but now succumbed at the age of forty to a fever and, weakened by exhaustion, died in November 1651, most probably of pneumonia.
The fortunes of the native Irish took a turn for the worse when Charles Fleetwood† succeeded as commander-in-chief and then lord deputy of Ireland. He was ruthless in his enforcement of the Settlement Act of 1652 in compensating parliamentary soldiers who had not been paid with land confiscated from Irish landowners. Perhaps about 10,000 parliamentarians settled in Ireland after the civil wars, although the greater gains in land were made by the Anglo-Irish already resident there. William Temple recognised this in a pamphlet he wrote more than a decade later, An Essay upon the present State and Settlement of Ireland, in which he deplored the inequity of the settlement that ‘from the beginning to the end [was] a meer Scramble … the Golden Shower falls without any well directed Order or Design, and is gathered up in greatest Measures by the Strongest, or the nearest Hands; while many who need it most, or deserve it best, either fail of any share, or go away with no more than what is very dear bought by the Pains they take, or the Blows they meet with in the Scuffle’.29
Always insightful and libertarian, William thought the fault lay with the lack of a plan at Charles II’s restoration, and the fatal desire to please all factions and accommodate every pushy or greedy claimant, whether their cause was merited or not. ‘And following this uncertain course they succeeded as such Counsels must ever do, instead of pleasing all they pleased none, and aiming to leave no Enemies to their Settlement of Ireland, they left it no Friends.’30 However, given the lack of will in the government and the complicated passions aroused in the dispossessed and newly enriched, he accepted it would be impossible to unravel and then create anew.
Even more destructive of the native Irish than the loss of ancestral lands was the policy of forced deportations for slave labour to Barbados and the Americas. William Petty,* who had travelled to Ireland with Cromwell as physician-general to the army, had won the contract to map Irish estates for redistribution – and ended up with a good deal of land himself. An early statistician, his analysis was likely to be more accurate than most and he estimated that in the wars between 1641 and 1653 about 600,000 people had either died or been exiled, representing about a third of the island’s population at the time.
By the time Dorothy and William arrived in Dublin in 1656, the worst atrocities of the wars were over and Dublin and its surrounding area were secure and sanitised of evidence of past rebellions and reprisals. Martha Temple wrote that they lived a very self-contained and contented family life, shuttling between Sir John’s house in Dublin and his estate in Carlow, a fertile agricultural county some fifty or so miles south-west of Dublin. This was good quality, gently undulating farming land, watered by the beautiful River Barrow and its tributary the Burren. It had probably been confiscated from its previous Catholic or rebel landowners and awarded to Sir John Temple for his work during the Irish rebellion of 1641 and subsequently in the distribution of land that he was employed to oversee. It was an extensive tract of excellent farming land, amounting to almost 1,500 acres, which William would one day inherit.
William had a house built for his growing family in Staplestown, otherwise known as Ballinacarrig, a hamlet a couple of miles from the town of Carlow. An Englishman Thomas Dineley, travelling from Dublin to Carlow some time in 1680 and recording his impressions on the way, described it as a triangular settlement with its apex formed by the Temples’ house, called the Turretts possibly as early as in William’s time. The Crown Inn and the castle on top of Castle Hill formed the other points of the triangle. In William and Dorothy’s time this was a small village surrounded by good farming land and with the River Burren running through it. The community was able to support a flour mill, farrier, mason and carpenter, and the daily coach from Dublin to Kilkenny, stopping at the Crown Inn, helped boost the local economy, bringing a flurry of activity and the reminder of a bigger world.
Dorothy was immediately welcomed into the Temple household. Having so quickly produced John, the family’s son and heir, can only have helped her enthusiastic acceptance but, nevertheless, Martha Temple reported how unusually well the new young Temple family fitted in, ‘where there was alwayes yt perfect agreement, as well as kindness & Confidence’.31 The amity was so marked that Martha wrote that other people commented favourably on the rareness of the familial harmony during William and Dorothy’s stay in Ireland.
Although his father had accepted positions under Cromwell, William apparently had made a resolution ‘of never entering into business under [the current] government’,32 and so spent his time in Ireland pursuing the life of a country gentleman. Much later and with the benefit of hindsight, he offered a simplified and rationalised explanation to his son for a disengagement that perhaps had more complex reasons: ‘The native love of my country and its ancient constitutions, would not suffer me to enter into public affairs till the way was open for the King’s happy restoration.’33
There was no doubt that ever since his boyhood in Sussex, William loved the countryside and grew to find his own family the most satisfactory company to keep. He had a sanguine temperament and a natural contentment with life. It may seem rather odd that a young man full of creative energy and in his prime, not in possession of a great fortune and with a family to support, should absent himself from any gainful employment. William seemed to address this himself while still in his early twenties, suggesting a kind of regret that he was neither compelled by more difficult circumstances to be ambitious, nor released by better circumstances to be free to pursue his ideals of scholarship and leisure:
I sometimes thinke that mine [fortune] and nature were at feud when they gave mee each of them a being, that I should have had a better rise upon any other spoke of fortunes wheel then that I was plac’d upon; were it on a lower I should have had the advantage of my own forc’t industry, if a higher of my owne free election; as I am, expectation of plenty flatters mee out of the first, and the sense of want forces mee from the last. had I been constrain’d to set up for my selfe whatever shop [business] it had been in I should not feare breaking [bancruptcy].
He continued by reiterating what was to prove a lifelong principle: ‘the improvement of the mind is a farr nobler end then the advancement of fortune’,34 although he admitted that his very lack of means had on several occasions prevented him from actually enlarging what meagre assets he had.
His sister recalled that his manner, once he was engaged on his diplomatic career, was one of effortless brilliance: ‘it had bin observed to be a part of his character never to seem busy in his greatest imployments’. She explained too that he was not inclined to forfeit his freedom to work for others in some dreary occupation just to make a living, neither was the enforced idleness and obsequiousness of the courtier’s life for him: ‘he hated the servitude of Courts, said he could never serve for wages, nor be busy (as one is soe often there) to no purpose.’35
Luckily Dorothy seemed to share his outlook on life. She too preferred the person
al to the public, the kingdom of the mind and imagination over any promise of gold, the pleasures of family to the revolving stage of fame, favour and preferment. She had written to William agreeing with the thought he had expressed in an earlier letter about how personal contentment was fundamental to all happiness:
I am clearly of your opinion that contentment (which the Spanish proverbe say’s is the best paint [cosmetic]) gives the Lustre to all on’s injoyments, puts a beauty upon things which without it would have none, increases it Extreamely where tis already in some degree and without it all that wee call happinesse besides looses its property. What is contentment must bee left to every perticuler person to judge for themselv’s, since they only know what is soe to them … only you and I agree tis to bee found by us in a True friend, a moderat fortune, and a retired life.36
William set himself to farm the land and plot out a garden in this undulating landscape on the outskirts of Carlow. His horticultural experiments, cultivating fruit trees and thinking about the perfect garden design began in these fertile acres. His reading and writing also gained from the happy leisurely hours he had to spend among his family and books. What time was not passed in his garden and in conversation with friends, William spent in his study, so much so that he used to say ‘he ow’d the greatest part of what he knew both of Phylosophy & Story to ye five years he pass’d then in Ireland’.37
Much as he loved the land, however, he had distinct reservations about the people. Living as he and his family did, within the narrow confines of the Anglo-Irish and English communities, he did not have much social interaction with the native Irish. In fact he would like to have seen his family’s county of Carlow, together with the neighbouring Wicklow, Kildare and Waterford, fenced off as a solely English plantation, and therefore a safe and prosperous ornament to the united kingdoms. William was a philosophical and kind man with strong libertarian principles that he found hard to extend to his Irish neighbours. He tended to take his much more experienced father’s view, and that of the majority of the Protestant elite, that the Irish might have something magical in their talent for blood-quickening music and for story-telling that could charm the dead, but they were basically an inferior, wild and scary race. This negative view may well have been due to the very fact that he was an outsider: as Lady Fanshawe explained, having lived among the Irish for some time, they were wonderful to each other but duplicitous with strangers (except the Spanish).