by Jane Dunn
CHAPTER EIGHT
Into the World
We bring into the world with us a poor, needy, uncertain life, short at the longest, and unquiet at the best; all the imaginations of the witty and the wise have been perpetually busied to find out the ways how to revive it with pleasures, or relieve it with diversions; how to compose it with ease, and settle it with safety. To some of these ends have been employed the institutions of lawgivers, the reasonings of philosophers, the inventions of poets, the pains of labouring, and the extravagances of voluptuous men. All the world is perpetually at work about nothing else, but only that our poor mortal lives should pass the easier and happier for that little time we possess them, or else end the better when we lose them. Upon this occasion riches came to be coveted, honours to be esteemed, friendship and love to be pursued, and virtues themselves to be admired in the world.
WILLIAM TEMPLE, letter to the Countess of Essex,
January 1674
IN THE LATE 1650s the brave experiments in non-monarchical government seemed increasingly discredited and riven with factions as Oliver Cromwell, the man who embodied the revolution, found his own health failing. The complex visionary and zealot, the courageous soldier and natural commander who had led the three kingdoms out of the civil wars and attempted to create a more egalitarian society, had himself become an unelected despot against the best principles of the commonwealth. There was no natural successor with the necessary qualities of vision, charismatic energy and ambition, and no clear plan for the future to inspire a disenchanted and weary people.
Genetically, nature reverts to the mean and an exceptional man is more likely to have children who approximate the norm. So it was with Cromwell. Richard,* his elder surviving son in whom he and the country were plainly disappointed, was more suited to be a cheery country gent, good-natured but inclined to drink too much and fall into debt. Staunch parliamentarian Lucy Hutchinson described him as, ‘a peasant in his nature, yet gentle and virtuous, but became not greatness’. From her own perspective of high Puritanism, she damned his younger brother Henry too, but for his lack of dogmatism and purity of principle, branding him a ‘debauched, ungodly Cavalier’.1
As Cromwell struggled with the relentless pain of gout and kidney stones, his family, who with his faith were the central prop of his life, seemed to be dying about him. His youngest daughter’s husband, Robert Rich, had expired in the bitter February of 1658, just four months after their marriage, leaving her a widow at twenty. His one-year-old granddaughter Dorothy, Richard’s child, with whom he’d had much to do, died too. But most harrowing of all for Cromwell was the slow excruciating death from cancer of his favourite daughter Betty. She had been named Elizabeth after her mother, and was herself only twenty-nine years old and the mother of four children. She was not only her father’s favourite; her warmth and charm had endeared her to the protectorate court. Cromwell was actively engaged in her care during her last terrible months, both daughter and father attempting to hide from each other their different agonies. When Betty finally died in August, Cromwell never truly recovered from his grief. Already suffering from kidney failure, the tertian malaria, a chronic periodic fever that plagued so many, undermined what strength he had left. On 3 September 1658, barely a month after his daughter’s funeral, he too was dead, naming his successor only in his dying hours.
The weather in his last week had been unseasonably vicious – on 30 August the country endured the worst storm in living memory: John Evelyn saw all his greatest trees at his much loved country estate Sayes Court torn from the ground and snapped like matchwood. Destruction on this scale had been countrywide as the ‘tempestious Wind’2 did not blow itself out until three o’clock the following day, stripping all the fruit from the trees and ruining the harvest for the coming winter. Superstitious royalists were quick to see this as an angry judgement from heaven on the protectorate as its architect lay dying. Others feared the storm was an omen of the terrors to come once Cromwell had gone.
This was the moment when the old royalists with revived hopes, the disaffected parliamentarians, all those who longed for the return of the ancient constitution were expected to rise up. Of all the nations, Ireland was the most obdurately set against the protectorate and most eager for the restoration of the monarchy. Cromwell had survived multiple plots against his life; now he had died in his bed where were the conspirators, where their supporters? Everyone in the land was unexpectedly quiescent and Richard Cromwell reluctantly stepped into his father’s mighty shadow.
Henry Cromwell had wholeheartedly supported his brother in becoming the new lord protector and had in turn been appointed lieutenant and governor general of Ireland, although he was much keener to return to England. As Richard failed to gain the confidence of a fractious, underpaid army and the newly elected parliament of January 1659, crippled by division and debt, seemed incapable of government, the army council stepped into the vacuum and in April demanded its dissolution. By the end of May, first Richard and then Henry Cromwell had resigned their authorities, Richard retiring to his estates and Henry at last quitting Ireland for England. To general consternation, the military now held sway.
There were riots, protests and unrest. John Evelyn, a moderate royalist, was praying at this time for ‘the heavenly power to deliver us from our Calamities’, since as he and many others saw it, ‘The Nation was now in extreame Confusion & unsetled, betweene the Armies & the Sectaries: and the poore Church of England breathing as it were her last, so sad a face of things had over-spread us.’3 Lucy Hutchinson despaired for different reasons. Writing the following March, she was full of fearful resignation after the dissolution of the reinstated Rump Parliament, as it heralded the return of the monarchy: ‘Now was that glorious Parliament come to a period, not so fatal to itself as to the three nations, whose sun of liberty then set, and all their glory gave place to the foulest mists that ever overspread a miserable people.’4 Most of the people seemed far from miserable as spring turned to summer. May Day was celebrated with maypoles for the first time since their suppression in 1654, and with it all the boisterous celebration and much merry drinking of the king’s health. The stage was being set for the return of Charles II.
Any change of regime always made for general anxiety: those who had been in favour with the declining power were fearful of what reprisals lay in store, while those who had languished in the political wilderness prepared to jockey for new positions of patronage and influence. Ireland was as unsettled as anywhere. By the summer of 1659 the popular governor Henry Cromwell had gone and the parliamentary commission sent from London caused further antagonism by dismissing many officers from the army. In December their discontent found an outlet in a military coup when Dublin Castle was seized, the victors demanding the restoration of parliament as a bulwark against the military faction currently in control in England. Soon other garrisons followed suit – Lord Broghill seized Youghal, on the south-east coast – and those who still retained republican sympathies were removed or arrested. Colonel Pretty, whose regiment was based at Carlow, the Temples’ home territory, had been taken prisoner by the regiment that had once been Henry Cromwell’s. Thus was the tide turning.
A convention of estates was established in Dublin to discuss the restoration of the old Irish parliament that pre-dated the rebellion of 1641. To his surprise William Temple was elected as a member for the county of Carlow for the convention that met on 7 February 1660. Lord Broghill also joined some three weeks later, which added further authority. Although probably sympathetic to the convention’s desire to see the restoration of the king, William initially did not seem to be particularly active in this his first political role. The fortunes of his family were uppermost in his mind. He and his father were in a difficult position, uncertain as to how a returning king might judge the Temple family’s record in the civil wars and commonwealth.
Dorothy, on the other hand, had unimpeachable royalist credentials through her father’s brave and personally costl
y stand at Castle Cornet and the deaths of her two brothers in active service for the king. Charles II’s gratitude to her family for the sacrifices they made for his father’s cause might have been expected to mitigate any resentment towards her husband and his family.
By the beginning of 1660, Sir John Temple was already in England. Due to his friendship with currently the most powerful man in the country, the soldier and politician General George Monck,* he had a place on the parliamentary council of state. As it became clear that Charles was going to be restored as king, there was a flurry of activity as every man of note and ambition began to petition him or his closest aides for preferment. Martha Temple mentioned that her father stood back from this collective supplication ‘wch he either thought not necessary, or was carelesse of the inconveniences that might follow’.5 Sir John may have been uncertain how his involvement with the aristocratic junto that had worked against Charles’s father might work against him. However, it was clear that the coming generation, William and his sister, possibly his wife too, thought such reticence unwise, particularly as their father, during his employment in Ireland, had not always seen eye to eye with the powerful royalist Earl of Ormonde.*
William set off for England. The convention had charged him to deliver a formal message to General Monck but he was also keen to see both his father and his beloved uncle, Dr Hammond. For such a peaceable and saintly man, Henry Hammond had had a dangerous and disruptive civil war, although it was clear that even his opponents thought highly of him and had refused at various times to implement directives against him. Chased from his pious scholarly life, he was imprisoned and then placed under house arrest in Oxford. He, along with ‘papists and delinquents’, was banned from travelling within twenty miles of London and thus had been unable to attend his mother on her deathbed. This was the doughty woman who had lived with him in his bachelor rectory at Penshurst and had helped care for her grandchildren, specifically William and the infant twins Martha and Henry.
Some time about 1649 Dr Hammond had sought refuge in Sir John and Lady Dorothy Packington’s mansion at Westwood Park, some ten miles from Worcester. In April 1660 William rode to the grand Elizabethan red-brick house, full of anticipation at seeing his uncle again. He was intent on asking this much respected sage and divine for advice on ‘how to governe himselfe’ as a young man having to make his way in the new regime that was about to be imposed on a tired and fractured country. This would seem a wise move, for Dr Hammond had been loved and trusted by both Charles I and his son.
It was late on 26 April when William finally arrived at the Packingtons’ door. Built on the brow of a hill overlooking the surrounding park and wooded countryside, the house was still grand and perfectly habitable, although the damage and dereliction caused in the civil wars were clear. Exhausted after his long journey, William knocked and asked for Dr Hammond. With a tragic synchronicity he was told he had arrived just too late: his uncle had died the previous day and been buried that afternoon.
William collapsed with exhaustion and grief. He was ill for a few days and cared for by the Packingtons who had been such fond and generous patrons of his uncle. Martha wrote, ‘indeed a greater loss Could happen to no Famely’,6 seeking to explain the rare sweetness of Henry Hammond’s nature and the intensity of his nephew’s grief. William’s collapse was indicative of two important aspects of his character and life. It showed how deeply he had felt for an uncle who had played the role of paterfamilias when he was a boy at a vulnerable time in his life. It also revealed William’s emotional nature where his spontaneous feelings and high-minded ideals made it hard for him to attempt the dissembling reserve of the diplomat he hoped to become. It was a similar access of emotion that had propelled William at the end of his courtship into suicidal despair – greatly alarming both his pragmatic father and Dorothy, always more controlled and discreet herself.
While recuperating, William would have met some of the other mourners at his uncle’s funeral, many almost as prostrate with grief as he. With journeys taking so long and the more leisurely pace of life, visits to large country houses lasted for days, even weeks. There were a number of royalist churchmen who had battled alongside Hammond to keep the flame of the Church of England alive with their inspirational writings, teaching and preaching. Richard Allestree,* a decade older than William, having fought on the king’s side throughout the wars, had become an academic and priest, often employed in taking messages between Charles II in exile and various supporters in England. He had made a detour on one of these journeys to visit his old friend at Westwood, arriving just a little earlier than William but too late for his friend, meeting Dr Hammond’s coffin on its way to church. It was a token of his mentor’s esteem that Allestree inherited Hammond’s library, left to him in his will.
A mutual friend of both Hammond and Allestree was the remarkably energetic John Fell,* closer in age to William but radically unlike him in temperament and way of life. He was an inspired polymath and workaholic who never married but wore himself out in his immense administrative, intellectual and spiritual projects. Eventually becoming Bishop of Oxford, he was a close friend of Hammond’s all through the difficult war years and the republican decade that followed and wrote an affecting and laudatory biography of his life. He too was most likely present at the funeral and related the following anecdote about the great man in his subsequent biography of him. It could have been said to, and about, William himself, with his love of combining horticulture with writing and his pleasure in a life surrounded by family and friends. It certainly revealed the emotional sympathy that existed between uncle and nephew:
On being asked what advice he would give to a young man making his way in the world [Hammond] said ‘I have heard say of a man who upon his death-bed being to take his farewell of his son, and considering what course of life to recommend that might secure his innocence, at last enjoined him to spend his time in making of verses and in dressing a garden; the old man thinking no temptation could creep into either of these employments. But I instead of these expedients will recommend these other, the doing all the good you can to every person, and the having of a friend [used to mean spouse or a close family member]; whereby your life shall not only be rendered innocent, but withal extreemly happy’.7
After a few days William had recovered his spirits and set off to see his father in London. The city had just heard of the king’s gracious acceptance of the House of Commons’ invitation to return and take up government. Bonfires were bristling from every hill, church bells were ringing, Londoners were taking every opportunity to drink the king’s health, some on their knees, ‘which methinks is a little too much’8 as Samuel Pepys protested. But Pepys was just as caught up in royal fever on board the ship that brought Charles II, his wife and two brothers from the Dutch city of Breda to England. A small armada of boats of all kinds, many filled with the king’s court in exile, escorted Charles all the way. Anne Fanshawe and her family were also on board the royal ship and, not a naturally poetic woman, she nevertheless left this evocative description of the voyage home:
The King imbarked about 4 of the clock, upon which we sett saile, the shore being covered with people, and shouts from all places of a good voyage, which was seconded with many volleys of shott interchanged. So favourable was the wind that the ships’ wherries went from ship to ship to visit their friends all night long. But who can sufficiently express the joy and gallantery [magnificent show] of that voyage – to see so many great ships, the best in the world; to hear the trumpets and all other musick; to see near an hundred brave ships saile before the wind with their wast clothes [extravagant sails] and streamers; the neatness and cleanness of the ships; the strength and jollity of the mariners; the gallantry of the commanders; the vast plenty of all sorts of provisions – but above all, the glorious Majesties of the King and his 2 brothers was so beyond man’s expectation and expression. The sea was calme, the moon shines at full, and the sun suffered not a cloud to hinder his prospect of the bes
t sight, by whose light and the mercifull bounty of God hee was sett safely on shore at Dover in Kent upon the 25th of May, 1660.9
William arrived in London in time to see the preparations for the city’s ebullient welcome to Charles II as king, fortuitously timed to coincide with his thirtieth birthday on 29 May. It is significant that William did not stay the extra few days to be part of this historic occasion and be seen as a supporter of the restoration. Perhaps he was uncertain as to his own position in the feverish jockeying for favour and preferment; perhaps he so heartily disdained such self-promotion he preferred to absent himself, despite the possible disadvantage to his future prospects. There was a story that when William’s name was mentioned to the newly restored king as eligible for some diplomatic mission, Charles retorted he had no desire to employ anyone of that family name. If true it may well have been in reaction to Sir John Temple’s temporary collaboration with the artistocrats involved in revolt against his father, or Charles was possibly remembering two other Temples, Peter and James, who had sat as judges at his father’s trial. As members of the elder branch of the family, the Temples of Stowe in Buckinghamshire, they were only remotely related to William, whose family was the younger, more impoverished branch and had a less clear-cut relationship to the crown. Turning his back on the wild celebrations, William instead returned as quickly as he could to Dorothy and his son, waiting for him in Ireland.
The Irish Catholics were particularly enthusiastic about the return of the king, believing that he would reverse the Cromwellian colonisation policy. Their disillusionment was to be long and bitter, for, apart from a few prominent individuals whose estates were returned to them, the land confiscations and redistributions remained much as before the restoration. William had seen no indication that it would be in his interests to return immediately to England. He threw himself into the work of the convention parliament. ‘While every body was vyeing who should make most Court to the King’,10 Charles rewarded Lord Broghill by making him 1st Earl of Orrery, and Sir Charles Coote, lord president of Connaught, became 1st Earl of Mountrath. The greatest prize was kept for James Butler, Earl of Ormonde, who had spent ten years with the king in exile, and in the spring of 1661 was created 1st Duke of Ormonde, lord high steward of England and eventually lord lieutenant of Ireland.