Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  While William was away on his diplomatic missions, Dorothy seemed to take upon herself the task of chasing up the money owed to him. In a letter to Sir Orlando Bridgeman,* who on Clarendon’s fall had succeeded to the post of lord keeper of the great seal of England, William excused the need for Dorothy’s labours on his behalf and requested the keeper’s ‘countenancing my wife in her pursuing the payment of my ordinary allowances while I am abroad; since the narrowness of my own fortunes (while it pleases God to continue my father’s life to us) will not suffer me to serve his Majesty without troubling him, as I am forced to do, whenever five or six months of my ordinaries are grown in arrears’.42

  Bridgeman had passed on an invitation to William to become secretary of state, a position that he believed was a ‘certain way of making any man’s fortune’. But this would never have been enough of a lure in itself for William, since such a job would have involved being part of Charles’s factional administration. He recognised he was not cut out to navigate successfully the cross-currents and whirlpools of power that eddied around the king; he had no interest in court life and little ambition for promotion, although he was as gratified with praise as the next man. He was quick to turn down the offer. Instead he preferred to see his great work through by attending the subsequent treaty, between France and Spain, due to be signed at AixlaChapelle in May. Excusing his lack of ambition to the industrious lord keeper, William revealed his pleasure in the familiar, and a natural contentment of mind: ‘to say the truth, I am very well as I am, being of so dull a complexion, that I do not remember any station or condition of life I have been in these dozen years, which I have not been pleased with, and a little unwilling to leave.’43

  Indeed he admitted to his father that after his success in the treaty ‘I was at the end of my ambition; having seen Flanders saved … and the general interest of Christendom secured against the power and attempts of France’. Although William was willing to remain resident at Brussels, his admiring friendship with de Witt and respect for the Dutch people meant he was open to a request by Arlington to become English ambassador at The Hague and was delighted to be given permission to return home to discuss it with Dorothy and his father. While he was at Aix, Martha had stayed behind in Brussels learning Spanish with an old archer of the king’s guards to whom she gave a silver sword hilt in appreciation. Perhaps half in love with her, he jestingly supposed it had enchanted powers to make him young again.

  William returned to Brussels, collected his sister and set off for London in June. He arrived back to a warm welcome by the king and court, ‘a great deal better than I deserve or pretend’. The Spanish ambassador and Lisola, ambassador to the Holy Roman Empire, together with his old friends, all urged William to petition for a peerage. Writing to his father, he said he was disinclined to press for one for himself but, aware of responsibility to his family’s name and status, suggested if he ever was offered such an honour he would rather the title was bestowed on his father, or better still on his son: ‘if it should ever be offered me, I resolve it shall either begin with you, if you desire it; or, if not, with my son, which I had much rather’. Given his own relative poverty and modest way of life, his reasons for not pursuing financial reward also expressed lofty principle and an altruism unnatural for the time: ‘I should be sorry to ask money of [the king] at a time when, for aught I can judge by the cry of the court, he wants it more than I do.’44 Charles’s profligacy to his women and his favourites was much discussed and widely deplored: it would be interesting to know if Dorothy agreed with William that what was morally owed to William and his family was better left in the king’s coffers.

  On the sea voyage home that January to receive the instructions from Charles that set the Triple Alliance in motion, William’s heart was full of love for his country. He began writing a heartfelt and patriotic poem that expressed a romantic pastoralism and affection for his fellow countrymen, the ‘brawny clowns, and sturdy seamen, fed/With manly food that their own fields have bred’ for whom he had such sympathy. He called it ‘Upon the Approach of the Shore of Harwich’ and added ‘In January, 1668. – Begun under the Mast’:

  Welcome, the fairest and the happiest earth,

  Seat of my hopes and pleasures, as my birth;

  … No child thou hast, ever approach’d thy shore,

  That lov’d thee better, or esteem’d thee more.

  Beaten with journeys, both of land and seas,

  Weary’d with care, the busy man’s disease;

  Pinched with the frost, and parched with the wind;

  Giddy with the rolling, and with fasting pin’d;

  Spited and vex’d, that winds and tides, and sands,

  Should all conspire to cross such great commands,

  As haste me home, with an account, that brings

  The doom of kingdoms to the best of Kings:

  Yet I respire at thy reviving sight,

  Welcome as health, and cheerful as the light.

  How I forget my anguish and my toils,

  Charm’d at th’approach of thy delightful soils!

  How, like a mother, thou holdst out thy arms,

  To save thy children from pursuing harms,

  And open’st thy kind bosom, where they find

  Safety from waves, and shelter from the wind:

  Thy cliffs so stately, and so green thy hills,

  This with respect, with hope the other fills

  All that approach thee; who believe they find

  A spring for winter, that they left behind.

  Thy sweet inclosures, and thy scatter’d farms,

  Shew thy secureness from thy neighbour’s harms;

  Their sheep in houses, and their men in towns,

  Sleep only safe; thine rove about their downs,

  And hills, and groves, and plains, and know no fear

  Of foes, or wolves, or cold throughout the year.

  William’s decision to make the analogy between the welcoming shore and the arms of a protective mother suggested perhaps something of the close relationship he had seen between Dorothy and their children. Possibly it reflected, too, the family romance of his own mother’s love, kept alive by his father’s fidelity to her all his life. Later lines in this poem, wishing his country and countrymen health and security, were rooted in the horror of the plague and the Great Fire, perhaps even with echoes of the unexplained deaths of his own infant children too:

  May never more contagious air arise

  To close so many of thy children’s eyes:

  But all about thee health and plenty vie,

  Which shall seem kindest to thee, earth or sky.

  May no more fires be seen among the towns,

  But charitable beacons on thy downs,

  Or else victorious bonfires in thy streets,

  Kindled by winds that blow from off thy fleets.45

  He was so happy to be home at last that he was in no hurry to accept an ambassadorship that meant he would have to leave again, possibly for years. Contributing to William’s reluctance was the scrimping of the commissioners to the treasury who had specifically cut the usual allowances to ambassadors, but most swingeingly those to the United Provinces where equipage was down from £3,000 to £1,000 and the ambassador’s allowance for running the embassy from £100 per week to £49.* Their refusal to allow him the usual advance on his expenses and insistence that he pay for all his official postage strained William’s loyalty and good nature to breaking point: ‘[these] are rigours that appear to me so mean, that I should think them malicious if they came not from my Friends’.46 He recognised that there were powerful factions opposed to his treaty and good relations with the Dutch, but the pressure this lack of money would put on his own income worried him too. ‘Though I do not pretend to make my fortune by these employments, yet I confess I do not pretend to ruin it neither,’47 William protested to his father. However he did ask quite insistently if he would come over from Ireland to see him before the end of August, suggesting he w
as about to accept the post despite these reservations, for that was the time when he would have to depart.

  Johan de Witt was delighted to hear that William was the new ambassador. The post had been allowed to lapse since James I’s reign and now the United Provinces were not only thought important enough for a fully accredited ambassador again but were being sent the hero of the Triple Alliance. De Witt commended William for ‘the generosity and sincerity I have observed in all your proceedings’ and naively read good augurs into Charles II’s choice of such a pro-Dutch diplomat: ‘it is impossible the King of Great Britain should not design to live in a perfect good intelligence with this State, when he sends us a person who ought to be so dear to us upon so many considerations … I cannot but rejoice when I consider, that I shall have to negotiate with a Minister who possesses all the qualities that can make him succeed in whatever he undertakes.’

  He ended by expressing his anguish at the death of his wife ‘who was indeed truly half of me [qui faisoit en effet la véritable moitié de moi-meme]’,48 able to confide his intimate feelings to William because, as he wrote, he knew they wished each other well in all concerns and both shared the close collaborative affection of a good marriage. William’s quick and heartfelt response seemed to help: ‘In your obliging letter … I find so many marks of affection and tenderness for me,’ de Witt replied; ‘of all the consolations given me in my affliction, there is none has been more effectual that what I received from you. I there find, it is the heart that speaks [j’y reconnois que c’est le coeur qui parle].’49

  In accepting the job, William may have had to wrench himself away from his beloved house and garden at Sheen but this time the emotional centre of his life came too. Dorothy and their son John, who was nearly thirteen, Diana, their three-year-old daughter, and the ever present Martha were to join William’s embassy at The Hague. Before she could sail, Dorothy once more had to apply her tenacity and charm to the unpleasant task of extracting as much of her husband’s allowance and back expenses as she could from Charles II’s ministers. Then, accompanied by her children and with the family’s household goods, she set sail on 26 October 1668 for Holland. Living expenses in The Hague were one-third higher than in London or Paris, William explained to the powers back home, pointing out that his house rental there was expensive at £200* per year. Finances must have been tight for the family as Dorothy made the journey back to London again in March 1669 in order to negotiate an increase in her husband’s living allowance. It took a lot of tedious hanging about and paying court but she appeared to be successful and returned to The Hague in June.

  In effect, William was right when he claimed that he was perfectly happy with what he had achieved in worldly terms: with the success of the Triple Alliance he felt his work was done. He had no desire for greater fame or fortune and with the added troubles of his new post and the old problems of getting paid perhaps he thought all the more fondly of his gardens at Sheen.

  Now that he was elevated to an ambassadorship, William, as his king’s representative abroad, was expected to comply with a complicated protocol made all the more punctilious about eight years previously by the French, whose king, Louis XIV, was careful that his own power and pre-eminence were manifest at all times. William found the insistence on strict etiquette towards other diplomats in order to underline petty differences in rank embarrassing, unnecessary and sometimes painful. For instance, in dealing with the Swedish envoy at The Hague he was forbidden to grace him with the courtesy of a handshake on greeting or accompany him to the door on the conclusion of their meeting, because he was of inferior rank. William’s charm and success in all he did relied on the straightforward friendliness of his manner and honesty of his dealings and he found these rules of engagement extremely inhibiting to his natural style. He wrote a heartfelt letter to Arlington asking for permission to relax this extreme French etiquette in his embassy. The request was discussed in the Privy Council but it was decided the rules had to be enforced.

  This meant that William decided to visit his friend de Witt incognito, so that he did not have to insist on the appropriate ambassadorial ceremony. He had already been astonished that at Maastricht that summer, returning from negotiating the treaty at Aix, it had been impossible to avoid the excessive honours due an English ambassador and a whole garrison of 5,000 cavalry and foot soldiers, fully armed, had clattered beneath his bedroom window to pay the town’s respects. His sister wrote of the obvious respect and affection with which William was greeted by Dutchmen everywhere, a warmth of welcome that Dorothy, as his charming and intelligent wife, would have been embraced by too: ‘[he] was receiv’d & distinguish’d by all the marks of regard & esteem for his character & person very differently from the rest yt were then at the Hague; & by the opinion he had gain’d of the truth & fairness in his dealing, was able to bring the States to measures, yt Monr de Witt said he was sure was in the power of no other man.’50

  Charles II had requested that William not only deal with de Witt but also pay friendly court to the king’s nephew, Prince William of Orange, now a young man of nearly eighteen. His father had died before he was born and his hereditary title, stadtholder of the Netherlands, was a military post that de Witt and the other governors of the provinces had decided, during his boyhood, should lapse. Prince William therefore had an anomalous position in this proud republic. De Witt, however, was friendly with him, had overseen his education and even taught him politics. He had also begun instructing the prince in the economics of the state in the hopes that he might translate some macro principles into his own private affairs where his personal finances were in disarray.

  William Temple went to pay an informal visit on Prince William within two days of arriving, only to be told he was off hunting and could see him the following day. Their official exchange of greetings happened only when William had made his public entry as ambassador into the town with all the pomp that such an occasion required. To his surprise this was accompanied by a wave of popular feeling from the ordinary Dutch who surged into the central square from all parts of the country. This was the first of many meetings and William grew increasingly impressed by the prince’s character, reporting to Arlington the following February:

  I find him in earnest a most extreme hopeful Prince, and to speak more plainly, something much better than I expected, and a Young Man of more parts than ordinary, and of the better sort, that is, not lying in that kind of Wit, which is neither of use to one’s self nor any body else; but in good plain sense with shews of Application if he had Business that deserved it, and this with extreme good agreeable Humour and Dispositions; and thus far of his way without any Vice. Besides, being sleepy always by Ten a Clock at night, and loving Hunting as much as he hates Swearing, and preferring Cock Ale before any sort of Wine.51

  Although William tended to think the best of men, hero-worship them even, and lived to regret his ingenuousness with some, his and Dorothy’s growing friendship with the Prince of Orange was to prove personally gratifying and politically of the greatest significance for his country and theirs. Showing a strikingly modern view of the role of a prince, William wrote that the motto he would create for this one was ‘Potius inservire Patriae liberae quam dominari servienti [Rather to be the servant of a country that is free than the master of one enslaved]’.52 So taken was he by this thought, William suggested to his friend Henry Sidney* that he should persuade the prince to strike some medals with that motto on one side showing himself on horseback commanding his troops and on the reverse side a quote he took from the end of Virgil’s Georgics IV about Caesar, ‘Per populos dat jura volentes [He spreads laws among the willing nations]’,53 showing the prince sitting in the midst of the United Provinces.

  Dorothy’s desire for a marriage of equals seemed also to be manifest in William’s work as a diplomat, for she was held in great esteem wherever she went and was described in the state papers as ‘Lady Ambassadress’. Lisola, ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire, revealed admiratio
n for her too in letters to William, requesting specifically ‘the company of your illustrious Lady, my Lady Temple’.54 Dorothy’s curiosity, rational intellect and acuity about human nature would have been of the greatest help to her more credulous and romantic husband. She well understood his diplomatic work and there was even a widespread rumour that she wrote her husband’s letters. He wrote excellent letters himself but probably inevitably ran difficult ones past her eye and incorporated any changes she might have suggested. Certainly this rumour showed that Dorothy’s quality of mind and wonderful felicity of phrase became evident quite quickly to William’s contemporaries, even in his official business.

  Life in The Hague for Dorothy would have been in many ways refreshingly different from England. The Dutch Republic had been so successful in its trading activities across the world, creating a magnificent merchant fleet and defensive navy, that it had become one of the great European powers. Its warehouses overflowed with exotic merchandise, as Martha found to her pleasure. The oriental designs on cloth and ceramics found their way into many aspects of European taste and Dorothy embroidered at least one large piece, a silk coverlet, with elements of the patterns she would have found on Chinese and Indian wares in these treasure-houses of sensual delight.

  Society too was more open and free with a less hierarchical class and social structure. Every visitor commented on the sense of freedom of speech and a certain egalitarianism in Dutch laws. An aristocrat would be punished for a crime just as readily and severely as a peasant. Dutch women were more independent than elsewhere in Europe: after the antics of Charles II’s increasingly dissolute court there was relief in finding these women so solidly capable and free of simpering and artificial mannerisms. The golden age of Dutch painting was on the wane by the time Dorothy joined William there but every house was full of pictures, some of the highest quality. There was a pragmatic element to their purchase: considered as a part of the furnishings, they were predominantly an attractive and efficient way of covering the walls. Dorothy and William, like most of their compatriots, bought Dutch paintings while in the city and brought them home to grace their own houses in England. In their case it was their quietly virtuoso van Dycks that so impressed John Evelyn on a subsequent visit to the Temples’ house at Sheen.