Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  Given William’s reading of Irish character, and the constant threat of rebellion, he suggested the only way forward after the divisive Settlement was ‘to keep a constant and severe hand in the Government of a Kingdom composed of Three several Nations [he was including the Scottish settlers], whose Religion and Language are different, and consequently the Passions and Interests contrary to one another; for to think of governing that Kingdom by a sweet and gentle obliging temper, is to think of putting four wild Horses into a Coach and driving them without Whip or Reins’.38 And, of course, tragically, he was right: Ireland remained for a long time a coach pulled in all directions by horses galloping on their own divergent paths.

  During this happy time in Carlow, with farming, fruit growing and scholarly endeavour, Dorothy asked William to translate for her the second book of Virgil’s Georgics.* This great poem was a celebration of the earth and everything that grows and grazes there. Born into a farming family, Virgil, in writing about the practical cultivation of olives and vines and beekeeping, was making much deeper political and philosophical points. The poem was a heartfelt cry for farmers and their families to return to the land that had been lost to them through civil war and other political manoeuvrings. It contrasted the farmer’s labour with that of the city dweller, the one in harmony with the gods and nature, productive and sustaining of his family and the wider civilisation, the other concerned with self, his energies focused on consumption.

  William was entirely sympathetic to Virgil’s point of view – the simple productive pleasures of the farmer, the intellectual journey of the scientist, both were ways of escaping the obsession with temporal power and material things: Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestes (Fortunate too is he who knows the rustic gods) was allied by Virgil to Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas (Happy he who has been able to find out the causes of things).

  Ever responsive to Dorothy’s wishes, William applied himself to Georgics, II 495–9:

  illum non populi fasces, non purpura regum

  flexit et infidos agitans discordia fratres,

  aut coniurato descendens Dacus ab Histro,

  non res Romanae perituraque regna; neque ille

  aut doluit miserans inopem aut inuidit habenti

  He came up with a very free version, in what he referred to as an imitation rather than a translation, a meditation indeed on his own attitude to life:

  Him move not princes’ frowns, nor people’s heats

  [He is moved by neither the opinion of his rulers nor

  the passions of the mob],

  Nor faithless civil jars, nor foreign threats;

  Nor Rome’s affairs, nor transitory crowns,

  The fall of Princes, or the rise of Clowns:

  All’s one to him; nor grieves he at the sad

  Events he hears, nor envies at the bad.39

  Outside the almost complete reliance on the small band of family and friends that characterised the Temples’ social life during these Irish years, the country in which they were to make their temporary home was a beautiful but abused place. Lady Fanshawe, a contemporary of Dorothy’s and a royalist wife of Sir Richard, Charles I’s treasurer of the navy in Ireland, recalled the attractions of a land that she had for a while made her home until Cromwell ‘so hotly marched over Ireland … that brave kingdom fallen in 6 or 8 months into a most miserable sad condition, as it hath been many times in most kings’ reigns. God knows why, for I presume not to say, but the natives seem to me a very loving people to each other and constantly false to strangers, the Spaniards only excepted. The country exceeds in timber and seaports, and great plenty of fish, fowle, flesh, and by shipping wants no forein commoditys.’40

  Having been seriously frightened by a ghostly apparition at the bedroom window while they were staying at Lady O’Brien’s house, the Fanshawes added ghosts and superstitions to the distinguishing qualities of Ireland. In their debate as to why there should be so many more supernatural sightings in Ireland than was the case in England, they decided it was due to ‘the want of that knowing faith that should deffend them from the power of the Devill, which he exercises amongst them very much’.41

  Sir Richard and Lady Fanshawe hurried on to Galway at the beginning of 1650, from where they were due to board a boat to Spain. Their landlord there had greeted them with the poignant words: ‘You are wellcome to this desolate city, where you now see the streets grown over with grass, once the finest little city in the world.’ He regaled them with a story that showed a different kind of abuse and trickery. The Marquis of Worcester,* another of his guests and a fine Catholic aristocrat and a royalist, had been sent to Ireland on a secret mission by Charles I. Having brokered a loan from the local Galway merchants, with his own and his friends’ jewels as security, for the equivalent of well over half a million pounds, he had displayed the jewels to the merchants before sealing them into a box that he then handed over. After a month of royal entertaining, the marquis set off for France with the money. When the period of the loan was up, the merchants requested the repayment of the money with some urgency as they needed it for their own businesses. ‘My Lord Marquis made no answer, which did at last so exasperate these men that they broke open the seales, and opening the box found nothing but rags and stones for their 8000 lb, at which they were highly inraged.’42

  As he waved the Fanshawes off on their further adventurous travels (they were attacked by Turkish pirates on their way to Malaga and their boat almost capsized on their return journey to France), the good-hearted landlord mentioned that he was pleased to see them leave still in possession of their health, indeed of their lives, for in the previous six months he had seen nine people of his acquaintance buried.

  In the four years since the Fanshawes fled Ireland grateful to have survived, daily life for the English inhabitants had improved. But the safe English ghetto Dorothy and William inhabited there was riven with fears and stories that gave cause for further fears. Dorothy and William, revelling in the beauty of the countryside and the delights of friends and family life, could not remain indifferent to the effects of the violence and injustices of the last decade.

  Society in Dublin at the time consisted of a small number of people living in intimate circumstances, drawn together by the dangers outside, their intimacy enhanced by their isolation. Dorothy would have recognised one of the most prominent members of the Dublin set, Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, as the notable playwright and author of the famous romance, Parthenissa, which she had read and not thought much of. But in Dublin he was as much a hero of the civil wars and subsequently of the peace, for as Cromwell’s loyal assistant in his suppression of the Irish rebels he had assured some security for the Protestant settlers, of whom his own family was an early and land-rich example. With the brilliant opportunism that William Temple, for instance, utterly lacked, he managed a crafty change of horses as the Cromwell reign was fading and quickly became a passionate supporter of Charles II’s restoration, inviting the king to land at Cork. Broghill was duly rewarded by being made the 1st Earl of Orrery.

  The Boyles were an important Anglo-Irish family. Broghill’s father Richard had arrived in Ireland as a lowly government official and, by the time he was twenty-six, had bought Sir Walter Raleigh’s Irish estates in Cork, Waterford and Tipperary. This was the foundation for further smart land acquisitions that made him the wealthiest landowner in Britain, largely at the expense of the local Irish lords and some questionable land deeds. In his fifties he became 1st Earl of Cork and then in his sixties lord treasurer of Ireland. Such were the possibilities then for clever, energetic, ambitious and less than scrupulous men. But the Boyle parents passed on some remarkable genes for, not only did twelve of their fifteen children survive to adulthood, one of the multi-talented Lord Broghill’s younger brothers was the great natural philosopher and founding member of the Royal Society, Robert Boyle of ‘Boyle’s Law’ fame.* There was at least one brilliant sister too, Catherine, who became the beloved and much admired Viscount
ess Ranelagh, presiding over an intellectual circle in London that included the poet John Milton, a sometime tutor of her sons.

  The most powerful man in Ireland during the majority of William and Dorothy’s time there was Dorothy’s old friend and beau, Henry Cromwell. Henry had already made his acquaintance with Ireland, arriving with his father’s army in 1649 and fighting alongside Lord Broghill in Munster and with his brother-in-law Henry Ireton in the Siege of Limerick. This time he came in peace, travelling to Dublin in July 1655, as commander-in-chief of the army, ostensibly to replace his subsequent brother-in-law, Charles Fleetwood, as lord deputy, but having to wait more than two years before officially being given the title to match his responsibilities.

  Henry was the most impressive of all Cromwell’s sons. Attractive, modest and intelligent, he instigated a more tolerant regime in Ireland, and was unusual in respecting the country as an entity quite separate from its relation with England. The story of his turning down an offer of Irish land worth £1,500* a year because the country was so poverty-stricken and the whole of Britain in such debt could only do his reputation among the Irish some good. Nevertheless, he lived in Dublin in style, his entourage providing a necessary entertainment for the soldiers and English settlers in the city and its environs. Given Sir John Temple’s connections with the administration and Dorothy’s warm feelings for Henry himself, it would have been odd if Dorothy and William had not had some social interaction with this old friend who had shared her love of Irish greyhounds. Both he and Dorothy had made happy marriages and when the Temples arrived in Dublin with their baby John they would have found Henry’s wife Elizabeth had just given birth to their own lusty son, Oliver, also named after his grandfather.

  The worst of the land seizures and deportations was over by the time Henry Cromwell and his family arrived and his main job was to suppress the radical Protestants, specifically the Baptists, and unify the rest. His treatment of the Irish Catholics tended to be tolerant and his tenure in Ireland was a success in that he brought understanding not violence to a damaged land. As such he tried not to open any more wounds. Dogs, horses and hunting were the national pleasures in a country rich in fertile soil, tracts of beautiful water, teeming wildlife and uncultivated land. Dorothy could indulge there to her heart’s content her passion for peaceful seclusion in the company of those she loved and the companionship of the choicest hunting dogs.

  Another interesting literary person who spent a year in Dublin during the very end of Dorothy and William’s time there was the much admired poet Katherine Philips, universally known as ‘the Matchless Orinda’.* Like Dorothy she had a passion for French romances and culture. Both shared too an interest in the philosophy of friendship, put into practice with a series of emotionally and intellectually close relationships, Dorothy with Lady Diana Rich and Jane Wright, Katherine with a wide group including Mary Aubrey, Anne Owen and Dorothy’s favourite preacher and religious writer, Jeremy Taylor. Like Dorothy, Katherine loved the Irish greyhound and honoured it with a poem that she could well have shared with her new friend:

  Behold this Creature’s Form and State,

  Which Nature therfore did create;

  That to the World might be express’d

  What meen [bearing] there can be in a Beast;

  And that we in this Shape may find

  A Lyon of another kind;

  For this Heroick beast does seem

  In Majesty to Rivall him

  Then after more lines on the greyhound’s quiet courage, loyal service and modesty allied to feats of majestic bravery she closed with this:

  Few Men of him to doe great things have learn’d,

  And when th’are done, to be so unconcern’d.43

  Although she was happy to circulate her poems among her inner circle, like Dorothy – and unlike the Duchess of Newcastle – Katherine was alarmed to think of possible publication, and the associated dishonour to her sex and social standing.

  There is no evidence as to when Dorothy and William met Katherine Philips but it seemed likely that it was in Dublin, where her friendship with an admiring Lord Broghill meant she was lionised and introduced to society there. Her translation of Corneille’s* tragedy La Mort de Pompée was staged in an acclaimed production in Dublin in February 1663. Certainly by the beginning of 1664, when both women had left Ireland, Katherine for Cardigan in Wales, Dorothy for London, they had exchanged some letters, only one of which is still extant, dated 22 January and sent to Dorothy, ‘att her lodging, at Mr Winn’s house neare the horse-Shoe in St Martin’s Lane London’. From this it is obvious that the younger woman was in awe of Dorothy and anxious to include her in her intimate circle of friends. Her letter-writing style, highly valued as it was by her contemporaries, contrasted markedly with that of Dorothy, whose extraordinary clarity of voice, conversational directness and acute insights and humour set her in a class of her own.

  Katherine Philips was responding to a letter from Dorothy praising her for some work of hers, probably both her poem on the recovery of Catherine of Braganza* from illness and her recent stage success with the translation of Pompey:

  I cannot choose but be proud of being own’d by so valuable a person as you are, & one whom all my Inclinations carry me to honour & Love at a very great rate, & you will find by the trouble I last gave you of this kind how impossible it will be for you to be rid of an importunity which you have so much encourag’d & how much your late silence alarm’d one yt is so much concern’d for ye honour you doe her in allowing her to hope you will frequently let her know she hath some room in your particular favour … [I] must beg you to beleive that if my Convent were indeed in Cataya [Cathay (China)], & I a recluse by vow to it, yet I should never attain mortification enough to be able willingly to deny my self the great entertainment of your correspondence which seems to remove me out of a solitary religious house on ye Mountains & places me in the most advantagious prospect upon both Court & Town, & gives me right to a better place then of either, & that, Madam is your friendship, which is so Great a present … you, whom though I esteem above most of ye world, yet I love yet more.

  Dorothy was very aware of how much power she wielded through her pen: the brilliance and fascination of her letters were acknowledged by all who received them and the pleasure and admiration they brought her were precious. Although she did not appear to long for publication and wider recognition of her literary skills, she received a more intimate validation of her talents and character within the circle of the friends and family who received and valued them. The horror that genteel women felt at the exposure of publication was well expressed in the remainder of Katherine’s letter to Dorothy. An unauthorised edition of 116 of Katherine’s poems had just appeared, published by Richard Marriott of Fleet Street, and, marooned in Wales, she asked Dorothy for her help in protecting her reputation from the suggestion that she had collaborated with the publisher:

  this hath so extreamly [distu]rb’d me, both to have my private follys so unhandsomly exposd, & ye beleif yt I beleive the most part of ye world are apt enough [to ha]ve, yt I conniv’d at this ugly accident, that I have been o[n] a Rack ever since I heard it … I shall need all my friends to be my Champions to ye Critticall & malicious, yt I am so Innocent of this pittifull design of a Knave to get a Groat, yt I was never more vex’d at any thing, & yt I utterly disclaim whatever he hath so unhandsomly expos’d; I know you have Goodness and Generosity enough to doe me this right in your company, & to give me your opinion too, how I may best get this impression supressed & myself vindicated.44

  In the spring of 1664, Katherine did manage to obtain her husband’s permission to escape the priory at Cardigan and go to London, to renew her friendships and re-enter the literary circle there. It would have been most likely that on this occasion she and Dorothy met again but, by the middle of June, Katherine had contracted the ever predatory smallpox that had threatened Dorothy’s life almost ten years before. In her poem, written just weeks before her own illness, a
bout the death from smallpox of Charles Rich, nineteen-year-old heir to the Earl of Warwick, Katherine Philips characterised the indiscriminate reach of this lethal virus:

  That fierce disease, which knows not how to spare

  The young, the Great, the Knowing, or the Fair.45

  Tragically, this fierce disease went on to claim Katherine who was dead within a week of falling ill. She was thirty-two. There was a convulsion of grief among her friends and wider society. Dorothy asked William, who knew and admired her too, to write an elegy. This was expected to be part of several such elegies written by fellow poets and friends to be published some time after her death. It was highly significant that William included Dorothy’s name in the title, ‘Upon Mrs. Philipp’s Death made at the Desire of My Lady Temple’, for Dorothy, as a modest woman, would not presume to publish in her own name. There is little doubt, however, that, as the title declared, she made a major contribution to the sentiment and probably even the language of this poem.

  The poem started by claiming that only rarely is there anyone whose death gives nobody cause for celebration, ‘The Rich leaves Heirs, the Great makes room’. The conceit they elaborated on was that only Katherine’s death brought universal sorrow:

  ’Tis sure some Star is fallen, and our hearts

  Grow heavy as its gentle influence parts.

  Thus said I, and like others hung my head,