Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  Certainly the first signs of royal favour were directed at Sir John Temple. Through William’s friendly relationship with Ormonde, the Great Duke sent a letter to Charles II recommending that Temple senior should be allowed to take up again his previous, and lucrative, position as Master of the Rolls in Ireland. William was gratified that the king wished to give him the documents himself, and in a private audience, ‘alone in his closet, where, after the gracious expressions of his favor and good opinion, he told me that in reward of my good affections and those services I had done him and for the engagement of many more he expected of me, he had resolved to give me the reversion of my father’s place [as Master of the Rolls]’. William was nearly thirty-six, not young by the standards of the day, and he had been idling at court for the best part of two years hoping for some diplomatic post. Now perhaps he could expect this interview with the king promised some reward at last for all that fallow time. His feelings of gratitude and affection for Ormonde overflowed and he promised eternal fealty: ‘You have given me like one of your own creations a ire-mark [brand] which can never be torn out but with the flesh that wears it.’28

  He had let it be known that he would like any diplomatic posting abroad that the king should see fit, but preferred not to have to go to the ‘Northerne Climates, wch he had always a great aversion too’. Sweden was mooted by Arlington as a possible posting but William turned it down, probably as being too cold: it was a gesture that recalled his sister Martha’s view of him as someone who would rather go unrewarded than compromise his principles or trade his freedom of action and thought for mere lucre. Around this time he had moved his family into the neighbourhood of Sheen, the old name for Richmond, in Surrey, close to the estate of Philip Sidney, Lord Lisle,* the eldest son of their old friend the Earl of Leicester, whose estate at Penshurst was William’s boyhood home. Here on the River Thames were the remains of an early fifteenth-century Carthusian priory, referred to in Shakespeare’s Henry V.† The magnificent gateway was still standing (it was demolished in the eighteenth century) and John Evelyn, in the 1670s, was intrigued to find a solitary monk’s cell in the grounds with its medieval cross still intact.

  It was likely that both William and Dorothy’s house and their neighbour Lisle’s were built in the priory grounds and their gardens carved from the fertile land, dug for more than a century by the monks and watered by the great river on their boundary. They retired there for the summer of 1665 and started on the garden. This was the second garden he and Dorothy would create and it became famous particularly for its fine and exotic fruit trees and vines, a special interest of William’s. Two years later, writing from Brussels to Lord Lisle, he mentioned how, in the midst of the frustrations of separation and diplomatic negotiations, he and Dorothy consoled themselves with thoughts of their garden at Sheen and their plans to enlarge it, plans Dorothy seems to have already discussed in his absence:

  my heart is set so much upon my little corner at Sheen, that, while I keep that, no other disappointments will be very sensible to me; and, because my wife tells me she is so bold as enter into talk of enlarging our dominions there, I am contriving here this summer, how a succession of cherries may be compassed from May to Michaelmas, and how the riches of Sheen vines may be improved by half a dozen sorts which are not yet known there, and which, I think, are much beyond any that are. I should be very glad to come and plant them myself this next season.29

  William moved his family out of town because he and Dorothy much preferred the country to the city. There was also the urgent thought that here they might be safer from the plague that had already got a hold on the United Provinces. The Dutch were a great seafaring nation and the infection was easily spread by fleas on rats on the merchant ships plying from port to port and between countries. It was rumoured that this outbreak followed the arrival of an infected ship from Algeria where bubonic plague was endemic. The Dutch epidemic reached its peak in the summer of 1664 but the British government had by then instituted a system of quarantining any ships from infected areas for between thirty and forty days. There was fear everywhere, for plague was a far more terrifying disease even than smallpox. The first symptom was a high fever and the tell-tale signs were the swellings (buboes) of the lymph nodes, most noticeably in the armpit, and sometimes spots on the skin. If there was a diagnosis of plague the whole household would become prisoners in their home, with food passed in until the patient was disease-free or, more likely, everyone had perished.

  This time England was not immune. The last serious attack of plague had occurred forty years before in 1625, but there had been isolated cases, particularly in the poorer areas of the city, most summers since then. On Christmas Eve of 1664 a fiery comet was seen in the winter sky as far afield as continental Europe. Astrologers had a heyday. They still constituted a respectable branch of the natural sciences and their attentions had been focused much more anxiously on the year after the next, the apocalyptic 1666. Triple sixes being the number of the Beast of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation, the year 1666 seemed to presage an overwhelming power of evil about to invade the land. But just as the new year of 1665 was beginning they suddenly had to focus their gaze on the present and work out the meanings of this comet, and a further one in March, as these dramatic celestial displays were considered terrible portents of disaster. Astrologers warned in the usual apocalyptic terms of flood, famine, fire and pestilence, and the religious Dissenters, who had been suppressed by the new king’s regime, railed that the comets were signs from God of his displeasure in Charles’s dissolute and irreligious court.

  For once the astrologers and doom-laden almanacks were proved spectacularly right. Pestilence did stalk the land and fire soon followed. The epidemic, which became known as the Great Plague, began in London in the spring of 1665 and was all but over by November when up to 100,000 Londoners, between a quarter and a third of the population, were dead. In the summer of 1665 Dorothy was very heavily pregnant with her eighth child. Pregnant women and children were particularly vulnerable to the plague and William and Dorothy hoped they and their family would be safe at Sheen, some ten miles west of London. To add to the general consternation, after months of hostilities the second Anglo-Dutch war broke out, largely fuelled by English greed and resentment at the Dutch domination of world trade. Now to the horror of plague was added real fears of invasion.

  After a hard-fought sea battle at Lowestoft on the east coast of England in June 1665, with England just about managing to claim victory, a messenger arrived at the Temples’ house in Sheen at four o’clock in the morning and told William that Lord Arlington wished to see him immediately. In terms of highest secrecy, William was asked to accept a mission abroad for his king, without knowing anything about where he was to go and what he was to do. Lord Arlington told William he was the first choice for this commission and if he agreed would need to depart in the next three or four days without discussing it with anyone. Apparently, William thought about it for a while; here was a chance of diplomatic work at last but his wife was in late pregnancy and the plague was so virulent at this time that it threatened every family. Eventually he told Arlington he would accept and Arlington replied that ‘whether he liked it or no, [it would prove] an entrance into his Majesties service, and the way to something he might like better’.30

  It was then explained to him that the Bishop of Münster, a bellicose, hard-drinking and avaricious princeling in the Holy Roman Empire, had approached Charles II and offered, in return for a large sum of money, to raise an army and invade Holland from the east while England continued hostilities from the sea. William’s job was to travel alone, without papers and in disguise, either as a Spaniard or Frenchman (he was fluent in both languages), to conclude the treaty, deliver the payment and expedite matters as far as possible. He was unhappy at being responsible for such an immense sum of money, ‘having ever been averse from charging myself with any body’s but my own’, so the merchant banker who was financing the bishop on behalf
of the crown, ‘the engaging Alderman Backwell’31 as William described him to his father, would be sent to make the transaction.

  By July William had set off on his secret mission, ‘as inquiet to leave his family in the danger of such a plague as then seemed to threaten his country, as they were to part with him without knowing to what part of the World he was sent or upon what arrant’.32 He travelled to Brussels and then on to Coesvelt where the bishop was awaited. The Bishop of Münster could speak only German, a language William had always disliked since his first travels abroad when he declared, ‘the Allmane is a language I should never learne unless twere to fright children when they cry, yet methinks it should bee good to cleare a mans throat that were hoarse with a cold’.33 As a result of their lack of facility in each other’s language they both conversed in Latin and the treaty was concluded within days. William returned to Brussels and authorised the first instalment of money to be released by the jolly alderman.

  The bishop turned out to be a treacherous ally with his own agenda to fleece the English and get revenge on the Dutch for some past wrongs. William admitted later to his brother that on this, his first employment as a diplomat, he was inexperienced, ‘having been young and very new in business’.34 Certainly his own honourable nature, impetuosity and a desire to see the best in people clouded his judgement when he had to deal with wily, double-dealing opportunists like Münster. He wrote to his father with his first impressions of the bishop, saying he thought him a man of his word and a trustworthy ally. He did however recognise a certain impious militancy in his nature, ‘rather made for the Sword than the Cross’ and also a pragmatic materialism: ‘he says, if he fails in his enterprise, and should lose his country, he shall esteem his condition not at all the worse; for in that case he will go into Italy, and has money enough in the bank of Venice to buy a Cardinal’s cap, which may become him better than his General’s staff.’

  William had been out of England on this commission for almost two months when he wrote this first explanatory letter to his father. Having left his family close by plague-ridden London and his wife heavy with child, he admitted his ever-present anxieties: ‘my concernment for them, in this miserable time among them, much greater while I am here than when I was with them, which makes me very impatient for every post that comes in, and yet very apprehensive of every letter I open’.35 He had no doubt heard in one of those letters of the terrifying ordeal his family went through shortly after he left them. The plague reached Sheen and came so close that one of their servants fell ill and another, in the adjoining house, died. Dorothy thought they might be safer after all in London and headed there with her household but the scene that greeted them was worse than any imaginings. Martha recalled vividly, even in old age, their desperate flight into the city: ‘soe many Houses being shut up with crosses upon the dores as they pass’d into the towne, & the people in them crying & wringing their hands at the windows, the bells all day tolling, the streets almost empty of every thing but funerals, that were perpetualy passing by, the difficulty of finding a lodgeing from the fright every body was in … people comeing in like Job’s messengers all day with one sad story before another was ended’.

  After two days of fright and misery Dorothy, with her son, Martha and the servants, decided to go home to Sheen again and trust in God’s blessing and a number of cures, but ‘above all the great one of resolveing whatever happen’d never to leave one another’.36

  Everyone remained in fine health and the sickly servant survived. This miracle of health Martha put down to the tireless round of herbal antidotes and fumigation they embarked on: most efficacious of all, she believed, was a cordial made to Sir Walter Raleigh’s recipe, called ‘a soveraigne Antidote angst the plague’, a spoonful of which was doled out to everyone in the house each morning. Fumigation was also tried with the aromatic herb bergamot burned in the rooms on rising and after the smoke had dispersed as many servants as possible were encouraged to smoke tobacco.* They strewed the herb rue on the window sills, to purify the air, and held myrrh in their mouths when entering a place they feared might be infected.

  The plague then moved out east from London to Greenwich, Deptford and Woolwich. As late as the end of August and beginning of September John Evelyn sent his whole family to stay with his brother at the Evelyn estate in Wotton in Surrey. A few days later, he rode back to his London house from Chatham in Kent, through the eastern suburbs from the Old Kent Road to St James’s, and he was deeply affected by what he saw: ‘Came home, there perishing now neare ten-thousand poore creatures weekely† … a dismal passage & dangerous, to see so many Cofines exposd in the streetes & the streete thin of people, the shops shut up, & all in mournefull silence, as not knowing whose turne might be next.’37 As commissioner for sick and wounded seamen, he had to organise a ‘Pest-ship’ to house the infected sailors, whose close proximity to each other and to the ships’ rats made them particularly vulnerable to plague. His mood was not lightened by the preacher Dr Plume,‡ who that Sunday blamed the current catastrophe on everyone’s wickedness, ‘shewing how our sins had drawne downe Gods Judgements’.

  That same September, Samuel Pepys was afraid to wear his new periwig on account of it having been bought in Westminster while the plague had been raging there. He mused that once the plague had passed fashions might change, for no one would be buying wigs fearful that they were made from hair harvested from the heads of the plague dead. He had seen the first signs of the inroads of the epidemic in early June: houses in Drury Lane were daubed with red crosses on the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ the despairing scrawl invoking divine pity for the living and the dying incarcerated together. Pepys was so fearful for his own fate that immediately he went to buy tobacco to chew to calm his fears, and perhaps ward off the pestilence.

  Frightful stories such as these and the constant fear of what the morning might bring haunted William in his lengthy separation from his family. He had been highly commended by Lord Arlington for his negotiations with the Bishop of Münster so far: ‘I forsee, by this your beginning, your friends will have little to answer for in your behalf at the end of your negotiation, if you continue as you begin.’38 But it was proving difficult for William to complete the increasingly awkward alliance with the bishop with the speed and efficiency with which he had begun. Münster had been warned by France that it would defend Holland and, not that William yet knew it, the treacherous bishop was playing for time in the hopes of extracting another tranche of money from the English.

  The atmosphere was febrile, with William trying hard to expedite this first commission professionally and maintain the good impression he had made in the initial negotiations and anxious about what was happening at home. To make matters worse, he was fast running out of money and his requests for reimbursement of expenses apparently fell on Arlington’s deaf ear. As a very moderate drinker himself, he was also suffering greatly from having to join in with the excessive hard-drinking culture of the bishop and members of his court, for to excuse himself from the bacchanalia was considered bad manners of the highest degree. Seriously concerned about his finances and physically bilious, William was not in the mood for the next piece of information transmitted from London. Charles II had appointed Lord Carlingford,* an Irishman recently elevated to an earldom, as envoy extraordinary to the Emperor Leopold,* with the brief to intercede in the negotiations William was currently conducting.

  Arlington’s courteous letters received a decidedly tetchy response, revealing not just William’s pique at having his territory invaded but insecurity as to his value to the king and Arlington:

  For your lordship [he wrote to Arlington], conjuring me in one of your letters to all candour and openness with his lordship [Carlingford], I assure you that you never said anything so little necessary; for I hope you know that your commands can never need any conjurations to endear them with me; and, besides, I know my duty so well as to value all persons, as well as all coins, according to that rate which his Maje
sty is pleased to put upon them … For what touches my own particular in this affair, I am very glad his Majesty has found a person who, by many several advantages and sorts of abilities, must needs acquit himself much better than I could have done.39

  William ended this letter full of disappointment at his treatment and the lack of concern for his financial embarrassment by recalling the flattering analogy Arlington had made of their relationship, signing off with a reordering of Horace’s words to Maecenas, cum sis rerum tutela mearum [since you are the guardian of my affairs]. Arlington would have known the context of this in Horace’s first epistle in which he complains about Maecenas’s insistence that he need have no worries because he is looking out for his protégé, whereas, in fact, when Horace has a problem Maecenas simply laughs and turns aside.

  Lord Arlington’s response could not have been more gracious and reassuring – truly Maecenas-like in fact – sympathising with his melancholy but explaining in the most reasonable terms that Carlingford’s appointment in no way reflected badly on William’s abilities: Charles had to send a man of higher rank to deal with the emperor and it made sense for him to visit all the local princes on his way. The best news Arlington conveyed, though, was that William was to be appointed as Charles II’s resident diplomat in Brussels and that the money issue would also be addressed. His letter ended with a display of his legendary, if somewhat unreliable, charm: ‘let me beg of you, in one word, to believe that neither your person nor services are undervalued by any body; and that a greater mortification could not befall me, than, loving you and esteeming you as I do, to see you either neglected or forgotten.’40