Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  William sent for Dorothy and his family in April 1666. She and her children, ten-year-old John and baby Diana, just a few months old, together with Martha and their servants had to pack up their clothes and linen and make the journey across the sea to Brussels. The Dutch war was still being waged with intermittent naval battles in the water between the two countries and occasional capture of each other’s foreign colonies. The sea crossing was not a pleasant one even in peacetime. This was Martha’s first trip outside the British Isles and Dorothy had not been to the Continent for fifteen years or more, since she first met William on her way to France.

  How much had happened since then when civil war still raged, Charles I was alive, as were her mother and father and favourite brother Robin. Now Dorothy, who had married the only man she had ever wanted and recently been honoured with his honour, by becoming Lady Temple, was travelling to meet him with their son and the baby daughter he had yet to see. She was to make a life for their family in Brussels, and play her own supporting part to her husband’s role as a diplomatic resident there.

  When they finally landed at Ostend, William could not be there to welcome them as he was still engaged on his cross-country mission to Münster. After longing to see him for so many months this unexpected delay was a blow to their spirits. However, by the time their coach was approaching Brussels, William had returned and ridden out to meet them. This was the first time he met his daughter, whose charm and beauty was to touch all their hearts and find a special place in his. The quietly magnetic presence of Dorothy, the love of his life, calmed him and made any alien place seem like home. The constancy and depth of his feelings for those he loved, Martha noticed, meant his love for Dorothy never wavered, their relationship built on a mutual desire for the other’s happiness: he ‘often repeated his owne happiness in a Wife that was always pleas’d to se him soe, & in returne was as easy to consent to any thing she liked’.

  They journeyed on to Brussels, together at last, ‘where they past one year with great satisfaction, & had at ye end of it another son’.51

  * * *

  * Richard Cromwell (1626–1712), fourth child and elder surviving son of Elizabeth Bourchier and Oliver Cromwell. Succeeded his father as lord protector in 1658. He fled abroad when the protectorate collapsed and remained in exile, separated from his wife and daughters, until 1680. On his return he lived quietly at Cheshunt under the assumed name of John Clarke. There were certain rumours of his homosexuality.

  * George Monck (or Monk), general and 1st Duke of Albemarle (1608–70), a Devon man and a professional soldier of genius who served Charles I loyally until captured in 1644. Refusing to change sides, he was imprisoned in the Tower. After the first civil war he accepted a commission with the parliamentary forces, proving his loyalty and military prowess in Ireland, Scotland and the first Dutch war of 1652–4 when he was appointed general-at-sea. Trusted by Oliver Cromwell, supportive of his son, he marched his troops south during the confusion that followed Cromwell’s death and Richard’s abdication. He became the natural kingmaker, ordering the reinstatement of the unpurged Long Parliament, spurning absolute power for himself and opening negotiations with Charles II. He was the first to welcome the king when he landed at Dover. The army he had marched down from Coldstream in Scotland became the Coldstream Guards and his distinguished military career continued with the second Dutch war, 1665–7. He took charge of London during the emergencies of the Great Plague and Great Fire. He died full of honours, was given a state funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey.

  * James Butler, 12th Earl and 1st Duke of Ormonde (1610–88), part of a leading family of the old English elite in Ireland owning much of Kilkenny. Loyal royalist, he was lord lieutenant of Ireland 1643–7 and 1649–50. After Cromwell’s Irish campaign he went into exile with Charles II and was involved in the negotiations to restore the monarchy. He returned to Ireland as lord lieutenant and was awarded his dukedom in 1661.

  * Richard Allestree (or Allestry) (1619–81), religious writer, regius professor of divinity at Oxford and provost of Eton College. A man of intellect, action and administration, he helped maintain Church of England services in the interregnum years. His writing was mostly anonymous but The Whole Duty of Man (1858), which may have been a collaborative work with Lady Dorothy Packington, was very influential in laying out the ideals for an orderly Protestant life. He is buried in the chapel at Eton.

  * John Fell (1625–86), classicist, philologist, writer, publisher, ecclesiastical builder and educator, eventually Bishop of Oxford (1676). Royalist soldier and then activist on behalf of the Church, University of Oxford and the university press, he built great buildings, was a moving force in every area of Oxford institutional life and was an inspirational teacher and disciplinarian, using epic tasks of translation as punishment for his wayward students. His publications and translations were numerous and he died, it was said, of overwork.

  * Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington (1616–85). Scholarly as a young man, he fought for Charles I during the civil wars and spent some time in exile with Charles II. A certain theatrical vanity made him wear a black plaster over a scar on his nose, and his portrait was even painted with the plaster in place. Charming and eloquent, he became a successful but deceitful and self-interested politician, rewarded with a peerage in 1663. He had a great estate at Euston and a London house, Arlington House, on a site on which Buckingham Palace would eventually be built.

  * Philip Sidney, 3rd Earl of Leicester (1619–98). Like his firebrand second brother Algernon, Philip fought on parliament’s side during the civil wars but did not carry his allegiance to the kind of ideological extremes that led to Algernon’s execution as a traitor. He inherited the title from his father in 1677, but was known most of his life as Lord Lisle. William was closest to his youngest brother Henry, who became Earl of Romney for services to the Prince of Orange during the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

  † King Henry, on the eve of the battle at Agincourt, says: ‘I have built/Two chantries where the sad and solemn priests/Sing still for Richard’s soul’.

  * Tobacco was thought to have protective qualities during an outbreak of plague. Rumours were rife to back this up: it was suggested that no tobacconist died of the Great Plague and even that at Eton every boy was ordered to smoke each morning and one, Tom Rogers, had the flogging of his life when caught not smoking.

  † The highest number of officially recorded deaths in a week of the plague was 7,165, from 12 to 19 September 1665.

  ‡ Thomas Plume (1630–1704), vicar of Greenwich and then archdeacon of Rochester. Educated at Cambridge, he was the son of influential merchants in Maldon, Essex, and founded the chair of astronomy and experimental philosophy at his university.

  * Theobald Taafe (? – 1677), created Earl of Carlingford in 1661.

  * Leopold I (1640–1705), Holy Roman Emperor, nicknamed ‘the Hogmouth’ because of his prognathous Hapsburg jaw. He had been destined for the Church but on the death of his elder brother, when he was fourteen, inherited his unmanageably extensive empire. He was not a man of war yet his long reign of forty-seven years was almost entirely concerned with trying to contain and outwit the irrepressible Louis XIV, finally making powerful alliances with Britain (first in 1689) against the French king. He also had to contain the marauding Ottoman Empire and the rebellious Protestants of Hungary. Each of his sons, Joseph and Charles, succeeded him as emperors.

  * Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639), poet and diplomat and provost of Eton. His biography was written by Izaac Walton.

  † Legatus est vir bonus peregre missus ad mentiendum Reipublicae causa.

  ‡ Francisco de Moura Cortereal, 3rd Marquis of Castel-Rodrigo (?–1675), of a rich and eminent Portuguese family. He became the governor of the Southern Netherland, 1664–8.

  * Philipp Wilhelm of Neuburg (1615–90), elector palatine, inherited the Palatinate, a state within the Holy Roman Empire, in 1685 from his Protestant cousin and switched it back to Catholicism. William descri
bed him: ‘he seems about fifty years old, tall, lean, very good mien, but more like an Italian than a German: all he says is civil, well bred, honneste, plain, easy and has an air of truth and honour.’ The French invaded in 1688 and thus began the Nine Years War.

  * Düsseldorf is about seventy-five miles from Münster.

  † Roermond is in Holland and over 110 miles from Münster.

  * Sir William Godolphin (1634?–96), protégé of Arlington and then highly regarded secretary to the English embassy at Madrid and eventually ambassador there. Knighted in 1668, he never married, converted to Catholicism and under duress designated his soul as the heir of his considerable fortune (£80,000, equivalent to more than £8 million today), thereby allowing the Jesuits to make a posthumous will which was challenged by his family. An Act of Parliament subsequently declared posthumous wills null and void and various charitable foundations and his niece and nephew shared his estate.

  † Hans Holbein ‘the Younger’ (1497–1543), born in Germany and an early master of oil painting, a recent invention most extensively employed by the Dutch. He is known particularly for his portraits painted at the court of Henry VIII of the king’s ministers and most of his wives, including the notorious portrait of Anne of Cleves that Henry accused of being too flattering and therefore inadvertently deceiving him into marriage. While painting another portrait of Henry he succumbed to the plague and died in his mid-forties at the height of his fame.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A Change in the Weather

  ‘It is not to live, to be hid all one’s life; but, if one has been abroad all day, one may be allowed to go home upon any great change of weather or company.’

  WILLIAM TEMPLE, Memoirs

  IN 1666 BRUSSELS was a far more pleasant place to be than London. Although it was the Catholic capital of the Spanish Netherlands it shared much of the tolerance and vitality of its northern Protestant neighbours. William Temple considered the people very different in their inclinations from their Spanish rulers and ‘the best subjects in the world’,1 industrious, creative and civilised. The walled town was prosperous and full of civic pride with its canals, fine buildings and bustling craftsmen, merchants and traders. It had shared in the Dutch golden age of painting with the Breughel father and sons producing scenes of everyday village life and religious subjects inspired with mundane reality and humour, often set in the Brabant countryside around Brussels. It was an intimate town with a wonderful park and gardens within the walls, a town where most people knew each other and socialising was frequent and informal.

  London at this time was far from carefree. It was the epicentre of two great catastrophes. Since the summer of 1665 the city and its suburbs had endured months of plague and already lost between a quarter and a third of its residents to the Black Death. Although by the following summer the worst was over the city was still fearfully watchful as the plague continued to claim victims in outlying boroughs. This huge loss of life caused practical difficulties for the mercantile life of the city and the defence of the realm, with the closing down of entertainments and businesses and a fundamental shortage of workers in all areas – and of sailors too, just when England was in the middle of a naval war with the Dutch.

  An epidemic on this scale also meant no Londoner went unscathed: everyone knew someone who had died and had seen parts of the city reduced to something like a ghost town: Pepys was shocked at its emptiness ‘like a place distressed – and forsaken’.2 Its citizens had fled or were suffering inexpressible horrors behind barred doors. The more fortunate dead were lined up in coffins in the streets and the rest bundled unceremoniously into stinking, steaming plague pits that reminded people of hell. In a religious age, for one’s relations to be buried without due ritual was a terrible negligence that compromised the soul’s passage to a better world. Individual stories of agony, madness and despair were told and retold everywhere. In his walks through the city, Pepys reported ‘how everybody’s looks and discourse in the street is of death and nothing else’.3

  The collective psyche of the city had become inward-looking, cautious and fearful; the few who ventured out were ‘walking like people that had taken leave of the world’.4 The soothsayers and priests did not help waken people from this nightmare, for they blamed the annus horribilis on the individual wickedness of London’s citizens, or the depravity of the country’s rulers and court. The fact that England was at war and a marauding Dutch fleet could any day sail up the Thames was also never far from mind.

  On 1 June the firing of big guns shattered the calm. In the Spanish Netherlands Dorothy and her family had only just joined William in Brussels and off its coast near Dunkirk the English fleet engaged with the Dutch in the Four Days’ Battle. Charles II’s new resident in Brussels would have been watching events very closely in his small patch of neutral territory: William and Dorothy possibly even heard the distant cannon. Once the battle was over they certainly were part of the modest celebrations in Brussels where both sides claimed the advantage and the English supporters, outnumbering the Dutch, gained enough bravado to trample on the opposition’s celebratory bonfire and claim victory for themselves.

  Back across the water, John Evelyn in his garden in London was startled by the unmistakable booming of naval cannon in battle and immediately rode for the coast. In his capacity as commissioner for sick and wounded seamen, he was particularly concerned for the safety of the sailors, but there was nothing to be seen. On his return to London he heard about the ‘exceeding shattring of both fleetes … our Generall retreating like a Lyon’.5 This lion was the redoubtable General George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, commander of the English fleet. The battle ended without any advantage to either navy but great destruction of both fleets and terrible loss of life. Evelyn expressed a universal sense of the pity and pointlessness of such a war, ‘none knowing for what reason we first ingagd in this ungratefull warr’. In shock and sorrow he surveyed the damage to the once mighty fleet at Sheerness: ‘here I beheld that sad spectacle, namely more than halfe of that gallant bulwark of the Kingdome miserably shatterd, hardly a Vessell intire, but appearing rather so many wracks & hulls, so cruely had the Dutch mangled us’.6

  He estimated ten or eleven ships were sunk, the most grievous being the Prince, and almost 600 men killed with 1,100 ‘miserably dismembred & wounded’:7 the Dutch lost between eighteen and twenty ships and more than 800 men were killed. Nothing was achieved except a tragic loss of life and damage to both fleets. This was a sorry start to the summer that saw greater temperatures than usual and an ominous lack of rain in the worst drought in sixty years. The plague still raged in Greenwich, the fleas and rats breeding fast in the summer heat.

  By the end of July the patched-up Dutch and English navies were at it again, this time off North Foreland, and the guns once more were heard at Whitehall. This battle, which came to be known as St James’s Fight because it happened on 25 July, St James’s Day, was a decisive victory for the English but at great human cost, more than 1,000 Dutch and 300 English killed for little gain. It lifted English spirits a little before the next blow fell.

  During a naval war the safest time to cross the sea was just after a great battle, for the fleets were moored in the dockyards making any great alarms or aggressive excursions unlikely. The impoverishment of the Temple fortunes had forced Dorothy to act. Having only just rejoined her husband in Brussels that spring, she decided to return to London in August in order to use her charm on Lord Arlington in the hopes that she could extract the expenses long owed to William. He had never been a wealthy man and they were forced into debt by his foreign missions. Now that his family had arrived and had to share his financial embarrassment, Dorothy wished to expedite herself what her husband’s letters of explanation, entreaty and complaint had signally failed to do. She did not enjoy sea journeys at the best of times but deplored injustice and was not easily deterred. No doubt Dorothy’s intelligence, discretion and charm worked on Arlington, as William somehow knew they would. He had
written ahead of her arrival: ‘I should not bring my wife into this scene, but that I know she will ask nothing but my own, is a person not apt to be troublesome or importunate, and in all kinds the best part of, My Lord, yours, etc.’8

  The Temple income, modest at the best of times, was much reduced by the costs incurred in executing William’s diplomatic duties, particularly the protracted dealings with the Bishop of Münster. Charles II’s agents and ambasssadors were largely left to fund their embassies themselves, with promises of future remuneration. The king’s own exchequer was in such a parlous state, however, and his disgruntled people suspected his mistresses were funded before more pressing matters of state, that extraction of legitimate expenses was a continually tricky matter.

  Dorothy had not long left London, her debt-collecting in part accomplished, when the city was convulsed again, this time in the holocaust that dumbfounded all who witnessed it. It started modestly enough. In the early morning of 2 September 1666 a small fire caught hold in a baker’s in Pudding Lane. In the ensuing inferno of the next four days, London’s crisscrossing streets, overcrowded houses, bustling shops and businesses, every familiar landmark, indeed the living heart of the city, was reduced to smouldering rubble and dust. ‘London was, but is no more’ was the shocked realisation and William at his new post in Brussels would have heard the rumours that suddenly spread as fast as any flame, that the city had been burned by the Dutch – or the French – both antagonists of the English in the current war. With plague having brought the city to its knees, it seemed almost inconceivable that fire would then sweep through this already blighted place reducing it to ash. How could two such catastrophes strike the city without some malevolent human agency being responsible? For a while it seemed that the firing of London was the most shocking and audacious terrorist attack to strike at the very heart of the country.