by Jane Dunn
When streight ’twas whisper’d ’tis Orinda’s dead:
Orinda! what! the glory of our Stage!
Crown of her Sex, and wonder of the Age!
…
Orinda! that was sent the World to give
The best example how to write and live!
The Queen of Poets, whosoe’er’s the King,
And to whose Sceptre all their homage bring!
Who more than Men conceiv’d and understood,
And more than Women knew how to be good.
… But she was young
And might have liv’d to tune the World, and sung
Us all asleep that now lament her fall,
And fate unjust, Heav’n unrelenting call.46
By the time they were mourning their friend, Dorothy and William had already answered heaven’s unrelenting call too many times and much closer to home. In the more than six years they were living their rustic dream in Ireland, Dorothy was almost constantly pregnant, but as she conceived and nurtured each child within her she then endured in quick succession their deaths as stillborns or very young infants. The death of a newborn baby was not unexpected in the seventeenth century but it still exerted powerful physical and emotional tolls in grief and a visceral sense of loss. Dorothy had to suffer this blighting of hope five times with a regularity that must have made her dread each pregnancy for the pain and grief it inevitably brought. Pregnancy was debilitating and childbirth painful and life-threatening. Experience had taught her she had to enter into that dark wood with little hope of emerging from her ordeal with a live baby. And each time she risked too the puerperal fever that had carried off William’s mother and would continue to kill hundreds of thousands of women in the centuries to come.
William suffered alongside Dorothy, all the while pouring more love and anxiety into their only child to have survived – John, the beloved ‘Little Creeper’. We have no direct evidence as to how they coped with these griefs but William expressed something of his own experience in a letter consoling the Countess of Essex* who was almost suicidally distraught on the death of her only daughter, and tried to bring the consolations of reason to the avalanche of parental grief: ‘[children under age] die in innocence, and without having tasted the miseries of life, so as we are sure they are well when they leave us, and escape much ill which would in all appearance have befallen them if they had staid longer with us. Besides, a parent may have twenty children, and so his mourning may run through all the best of his life, if his losses are frequent of that kind.’47
He wrote how prolonged grief not only destroys the happiness and health of the grieving parent but also affects everyone else in close proximity: ‘Next to the mischiefs we do ourselves, are those we do our children and our friends [family], as those who deserve best of us.’ William showed psychological insight when he wrote of the effects depression could have on the living child, in his and Dorothy’s case their own firstborn John: ‘You suffer [your child] to live to be born, yet, by your ill usage of yourself, should so much impair the strength of its body and health, and perhaps the very temper of its mind, by giving it such an infusion of melancholy as may serve to discolour the objects and disrelish the accidents it may meet with in the common train of life.’48
Their friend Katherine Philips, after seven barren years of marriage, had finally given birth to her only son, who lived for forty days. He was born in the same year as Dorothy and William’s precious and still living son John and the parallels would not have been lost on them all. This was Katherine’s elegy* to him and a raw expression of the inexpressible grief of a parent whose child has died:
I did but see him, and he disappear’d,
I did but touch the Rose-bud, and it fell;
A sorrow unfore-seen and scarcely fear’d,
Soe ill can mortals their afflictions spell.
And now (sweet Babe) what can my trembling heart
Suggest to right my doleful fate or thee?
Tears are my Muse, and sorrow all my Art,
So piercing groans must be thy Elogy.49
William’s letter and Katherine’s poem are just two examples among many that belie any claim that in an age of high child mortality and strong religious belief parents did not suffer acutely at the deaths of their children. It was during this time in Ireland of grief for their lost children and emotional uncertainty that William wrote his family prayer, unexpectedly conventional in its religious content. Perhaps suffering had made him turn for consolation to something closer to Dorothy’s more pious embrace of God, but also he had attempted to write a prayer to satisfy every shade of religious opinion within his household, from Puritan to Roman Catholic: ‘A Family Prayer made in the Fanatic Times, when our Servants were of so many different Sects; and composed with the Design that all might join in it, and so as to contain what was necessary for any to know and to do.’
Perhaps because of this need for inclusivity it was long and uninspired and it is easy to imagine young John and the servants shuffling their feet while William intoned it at the end of each day. After a general ramble through the basics tenets of Christianity, he wound up with something more interesting, everyday and personal:
Moderate our desires after the things of this life; give us hearts thankful for the possession of them, and patient under the loss, whenever thou that gavest shall see fit to take away, and to leave us naked as thou madest us … Accept, oh Lord! our humble thanks and praises for all thy gracious dealings towards us, even in temporal things; for the mercys of our lives past, for those of the day past; for the continuance of our health, our strength, our senses, our reasons; for the daily repairs of our wasting bodies. In thee, oh Lord! we live, and move, and have our being. We depend upon thee for the rest and refreshment of this ensuing night, for the light of another day, for all the good we hope for in the remaining part of our lives.50
It was the early 1660s, another great revolution of the political wheel was in motion and the time had come for William to enter the world. Ireland had offered the leisured life of a country gentleman. Hobby farming, building gardens, working out his philosophical ideas, reading, studying, writing essays and poems, were all embarked on by William in the brilliant company of his wife, with the pleasures of his son and the affection of his still unmarried sister Martha, their father and wider circle of privileged friends. Martha was already closely involved in her brother’s and Dorothy’s life, and she perceptively reckoned that if it was not for the tragedies of their babies’ deaths William and Dorothy would have remained in happy retirement in Ireland. Her words carried the ring of truth: ‘he had five children buried there, & without that misfortune, being an extream fond father his friends use to doubte whether any thing had prevail’d with him to leave the cares of his sheep and Garden … haveing built what was convenient to his Famely in a very pleasant place in a very pleasant seat there wch his Father gave him up entirely ye management off, & wch he was extream fond off, had no thoughts of stirring, till theese Misfortunes happen’d in his owne Famely.’51
Home and garden were enormously important to them both and Dorothy and William turned their eyes from the rolling fertile acres of Carlow to England, knowing that they were to leave their library and the cultivation of fruit trees, vegetables and herbs. They would have to find another place that could be turned into a kind of paradise. Once more, a new great game was about to begin and it was time for William to become a player at last and take his chances with the snakes and ladders of the coming regime.
* * *
* Benjamin Styles made his fortune by investing in the South Sea Company, whose sub-governor was his brother-in-law Sir John Eyles. With the benefit of inside knowledge about the imminent bursting of the South Sea Bubble, Styles extracted his fortune just in time and set to work on turning what had been the beautiful brick mansion of the Duke of Monmouth (Charles II’s natural son) into what Pevsner has called the grandest Palladian house in Hertfordshire – at the cost of more than £18 milli
on in today’s money.
* Lucy Harington (1581–1627) was married at the age of thirteen to Edward Russell, Earl of Bedford, a twenty-two-year-old invalid. She bought the Twickenham Park estate from Francis Bacon, had a new house built and laid out the gardens. She then used the expertise she acquired with this garden in her new acquisition at Moor Park. Her houses became meeting places for poets and intellectuals: she was a subject for Ben Jonson’s verse and acted in his masques; John Donne was inspired by her to write, among other things, the poem titled ‘Twickenham Garden’.
* John Donne (1572–1631) as dean of St Paul’s was one of the most famous preachers of his time and the greatest non-dramatic poet. He was friends with Magdalen Herbert, mother of the poet and divine George Herbert and wife of Dorothy’s uncle, the aesthete and regicide Sir John Danvers and, among other influential supporters, Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and James I’s favourite, the notorious Duke of Buckingham.
* Close to half a million pounds by today’s reckoning.
* Sir James Thynne owned the estate of Longleat in Witshire. Lady Isabella Rich was the eldest child of Sir Henry Rich, 1st Earl of Holland, and half-sister to Lady Diana Rich, Dorothy’s great friend who, despite her charm and beauty, never married. Sir James died on 12 October 1670. He and Isabella had no children.
* Robert Sidney (1595–1677), 2nd Earl of Leicester, was a lawyer, member of parliament and diplomat, his career hampered by his easy-going and unambitious nature. He was great-nephew of Elizabeth I’s favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and nephew of the poet, soldier and statesman Sir Philip Sidney. In 1616 he married Dorothy, a daughter of the powerful Percy family who were earls of Northumberland. They had six sons and seven daughters; their eldest daughter Dorothy became the poet Edmund Waller’s muse as ‘Sacharissa’ and their sons Algernon and Henry distinguished themselves as republican conspirator and statesman respectively. Penshurst was the Sidneys’ medieval mansion in Kent.
* Sir John Percival (1629–c.1676) inherited vast estates in England and Ireland, accumulated by the Elizabethan adventurer and politician, his grandfather Richard Percival.
* Robert Venables (1613–87) as a battle-scarred colonel was with Cromwell in Ireland and took part in the infamous sack of Drogheda. After the disaster of his West Indies venture he returned uninvited to England, was treated as a deserter, stripped of his command and thrown into the Tower. He returned to his estate to live quietly in a loveless second marriage, publishing in 1662 a bestseller on the practice and joys of fishing, The Experienc’d Angler.
* The date of birth is given in Notes and Queries, 2 October 1926, p. 239. It had subsequently been generally accepted that this John died as a baby and that it was a second son John, born some nine years later in 1663 or 1664, who lived to adulthood to become Secretary for War. But the detective work of Homer Woodbridge in his 1940 biography of Sir William Temple suggests that the John who grew to adulthood must have been this first child. There is a marriage licence between John Temple and Marie du Plessis, issued by the Bishop of London on 7 September 1685, that states that John was then twenty-eight years old (in fact he was twenty-nine). Woodbridge cites persuasive ancillary evidence for his identification that it was Dorothy and William’s first child who lived when he points out that in 1677 John brought an important document from the Earl of Danby in London to his father in Nijmegen. It is more likely that a man of twenty-one would be entrusted with this errand rather than a boy of thirteen or fourteen. On an even earlier occasion, William wrote in 1674 to Danby to suggest that John, who was travelling from England to him in Holland, could be the messenger for any confidential directives. Again, it makes even more compelling sense if John Temple was nearly nineteen rather than merely ten or eleven years old. So I also have presumed that this first child, born at the end of 1655, is the John Temple who survived infancy to marry and have two daughters, Elizabeth and Dorothy.
* Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (1593–1641), was a powerful, magnetic and controversial politician who switched from being a committed Calvinistic parliamentarian to a ruthless supporter of Charles I and the Church. He made his name and fortune in Ireland, was created an earl in 1640 by a grateful Charles I and then abandoned by the king as his own regime crumbled, when Charles assented to the death sentence passed on him after a blatantly trumped-up parliamentary trial that had more to do with revenge than justice. He was executed on Tower Hill in 1641.
* Henry Ireton (1611–51) was the cool intellectual lieutenant to Cromwell’s passionate idealist. Educated at Oxford and then Middle Temple, he married Cromwell’s eldest daughter Bridget in 1646. A doughty soldier throughout the civil wars, he was promoted to major-general and accompanied Cromwell to Ireland, remaining there as his lord deputy. He was given a grand state funeral with his horse caparisoned in gold and crimson leading the solemn black-swathed procession, much to the fascination and scorn of royalists such as John Evelyn.
† Charles Fleetwood (1618?–92) was a lawyer who distinguished himself as a soldier during the civil wars. In 1654 he became MP for Marlborough in Wiltshire. The best career move was to marry Bridget, Cromwell’s eldest daughter and Ireton’s widow, and be sent as commander-in-chief to Ireland, then lord deputy. He relinquished this post to Henry Cromwell in 1655.
* Sir William Petty (1623–87), a clever precocious boy who became a doctor, scientist, inventor and economist. A charter member of the Royal Society, he was knighted by Charles II in 1661. He coined the term ‘political arithmetic’ to describe the mathematical analysis of a country’s resources and the statistical calculations of property and population to help ascertain levels of taxation. The Earl of Essex found him hard to bear: ‘in all his Majesty’s three kingdoms there lives not a more grating man than Sir William Petty’.
* Virgil (70 BC–19 BC), greatest poet of ancient Rome. Born near Mantua in northern Italy, he lost his estates there when they were confiscated and given to soldiers after the defeat of Brutus and Cassius in 42 BC. The Georgics was his second major poem consisting of 2,000 lines on farming but with rich mythological, patriotic, philosophical and spiritual allusions. It took seven years to write, finished in 29 BC, after which Virgil immediately began the Aeneid.
* Edward Somerset, 2nd Marquis of Worcester (1601–67), a staunch and wealthy royalist and inventor who owned Raglan Castle and a good deal of land in Wales. He spent much of the civil wars in France. On his return to England he was imprisoned in the Tower for two years; he then invented and built his ‘Water Commanding Engine’, a steam engine that ‘raises water more than forty geometrical feet, by the power of one man only’. The details of this he published in a literary work entitled A century of the names and scantlings of such inventions as at present I can call to mind to have tried and perfected which (my former notes being lost) I have, at the instance of a powerful friend, endeavored now, in the year 1665, to set these down in such a way, as may sufficiently instruct me to put any of them into practice’. There was a possibility that he got the idea for the steam engine from a Norman, Solomon de Cause, who had been incarcerated in Bicetre asylum by a cardinal fed up with being pestered by him about his new invention.
* Robert Boyle in 1662 discovered the gas law that every science student knows: that the product of the volume and the pressure of a fixed quantity of an ideal gas is constant, given constant temperature. This was used to predict the result of introducing a change, in volume and pressure only, to a fixed quantity of gas, meaning, roughly, that to increase the volume of gas requires a proportional decrease in the pressure, so long as the temperature remains the same.
* The equivalent of an annual income of just under £200,000.
* Katherine Philips (1632–64), poet, translator and playwright, was the daughter of a London cloth merchant. In 1648, when she was sixteen, she married Colonel James Philips, a fifty-four-year-old Welsh widower. She established a literary coterie of friends in London, all with assumed poetic names, and addressed many of her poems to them. An
unauthorised collection of her verse was published to her dismay in 1664. Her high reputation was elevated further by her tragic death at thirty-two of smallpox.
* Pierre Corneille (1606–84), a leading French dramatist born in Rouen but based largely in Paris. His most famous and controversial play was Le Cid (1635), violently criticised for ignoring the rules of classical drama and the need for moral instruction. La Mort de Pompée (1642–3) leaned heavily on Lucan’s epic poem Pharsalia about the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, but Corneille made Pompey’s widow Cornelia the star of the second half, driven as much by politics as by love and revenge.
* Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705), Catholic daughter of King John IV of Portugal and long-suffering wife from 1662 of Charles II. Her influence was undermined by her inability to produce a live heir and her position at court by her husband’s many openly pursued mistresses.
* Elizabeth, Countess of Essex (1636–1718), was married to the politician Arthur Capel, 21st (1st Capel) Earl of Essex (1631–83). His father was executed in 1649 for his support of Charles I. Essex was critical of Charles II but appointed by him in 1672 lord lieutenant of Ireland. He was a scrupulously fair governor of this factional island and he and the countess were in Ireland until the earl was dismissed in 1677 for not raising enough revenue. Probably wrongly implicated in a plot in 1683 to assassinate Charles II and his brother James, he committed suicide in prison.
* ‘On the death of my first and dearest childe, Hector Philipps, borne the 23rd of Aprill, and dy’d the 2nd of May 1655’. She mentioned in his epitaph that he lived forty days, so the copier of this poem might have mistakenly written May not June. Almost exactly a year later Katherine gave birth to her only other child, a daughter Katherine, on 13 April 1656 at home in the Priory, Cardigan. This Katherine was just eight years old when her mother died. She eventually married Lewis Wogan, MP for Pembroke, and had sixteen children, only one of whom survived.