by Jane Dunn
Talk of sex and money consumed the court. The fact that the king allowed his avaricious favourites and mistresses to consider the exchequer their private bank for their own enrichment was one of the most damaging charges against him. Just after Charles elevated Louise to Duchess of Portsmouth, she requested he finance ‘a Necklasse of Pearle, £8000 price, of a Marchant, and a payre of Diamond Pendants, 3000 guynyes, of Elder Lady Northumberland’66 and he weakly told her to make friends with the treasurer Lord Danby, which no doubt she did. Malicious gossip circled as to how she dimmed the attractions of Nell Gwyn† and threatened the status of the enduringly influential Lady Castlemaine,‡ a woman heartily disliked in the country and dismissed by the usually mild-mannered John Evelyn as ‘another Lady of Pleasure & curse of our nation’.67
It was ten months before William was finally allowed officially to end his embassy in The Hague and send at last for Dorothy and his family. In the late summer of 1671 she packed up their personal clothes and goods and eventually said farewell to her Dutch friends, the Prince of Orange and Johan de Witt, and boarded the Merlin, one of Charles II’s yachts, for home. For a woman who feared sea journeys this one was to prove much more adventurous, even dangerous, than any Dorothy had endured before and her steadfast conduct was to gain her commendation from the king.
Merlin was a small ship of just over 100 tons with eight guns up: her commander had been ordered to sail straight through the Dutch fleet currently patrolling the English Channel and demand that the Dutch salute the British by striking their flag. If they refused then he had permission to enforce their submission with cannon shot. This was part of the drive by Charles, encouraged by the punctilious, warmongering French, to humiliate the Dutch and goad them into renewed hostilities, a subterfuge considered shameful and ridiculous by many of Charles II’s subjects. John Evelyn, a proud navy man, considered the Merlin a trifling vessel in terms of her tonnage and really just a pleasure boat and to demand the Dutch defer to her was a spurious excuse for ‘a quarel slenderly grounded, & not becoming Christian neighbours, & of a [shared] Religion’.68 The honest soldier, Sir Charles Lyttelton,* who was to become a neighbour of Dorothy and William’s at Sheen, was even more forthright: ‘I had news last post which I can scarce credit, that there is one of the King’s yachts ordered to go to the Dutch fleet and to require their admiral to strike his flag, and if he do not, to fire at him.’69 When the yacht’s captain encountered the Dutch fleet on his return journey with Dorothy and her children on board he fired several warning shots at the ships closest to him, as he had been instructed. The Dutch, unaware of the expectation that they should strike their flag to any of Charles’s vessels, thought that the yacht perhaps was in trouble and the shots were fired to advertise her distress.
Ever courteous, the Dutch vice-admiral van Ghent,* instigator of the humiliating attack on the British fleet at Chatham four years earlier, came aboard the yacht, paid a handsome compliment to Dorothy, and enquired what the shooting had meant. The Merlin’s captain spoke plainly: ‘he had been sent to bring back the English Ambassadress, with her family, from Holland; and had orders to make the Dutch fleet strike wherever he met them in the Channel.’ To this the Dutchman replied that he had received no orders to this effect but even if he had, he pointed out, ‘the Captain could not pretend the fleet and Admiral should strike to a yacht, which was but a pleasure-boat, or at least served only for passage, and could not pass for one of the King’s men of war.’70 This perplexed the poor captain of the Merlin who came to Dorothy for advice as to how to proceed. She patriotically instructed him to follow his orders regardless of her presence or the safety of herself and her children.
The captain sailed on through the fleet, without forcing the Dutch to salute them, and landed Dorothy safely. When she arrived later at court she was made much of and commended for her courage. That evening she was interviewed by Sir Leoline Jenkins† and then reunited with William at Sheen and shown the newly refurbished and beautified house and gardens there. When he next dragged himself away from his country and familial pursuits, William met Charles II to take his formal leave of his ambassadorship. The king began to speak admiringly of Dorothy’s adventure at sea and William attempted a joke by saying, ‘however matters went, it must be confessed that there was some merit in my family, since I had made the alliance with Holland, and my wife was like to have the honour of making the war.’71 This elicited a smile from Charles and, with his hand proffered for William to kiss, they parted on good terms.
In his long newsy letter to his father William explained his feelings of regret at the contempt shown by his government for the Triple Alliance he had made so impressively his own: ‘And thus an adventure has ended in smoke, which had for almost three years made so much noise in the world, restored and preserved so long the general peace, and left his Majesty the arbitrage of al affairs among our neighbours … to follow his measures, for the common safety and peace of Christendom.’
In public at least he blamed no one but instead acknowledged his own temperamental antipathy to the Machiavellian designs of modern diplomacy: ‘I have been long enough in Courts and public business, to know a great deal of the world and of myself; and to find that we are not made for one another, and that neither of us are like to alter either our natures or our customs: and that in course and periods of public government, as well as private life, quisque suos patimur manes [each of us comes to terms with his own ghosts].’*72
* * *
* John Evelyn had published in 1661 Fumifugium: or the inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London dissipated in which he pleaded for the removal of dangerous and polluting industries out of the heart of the city and into less populous, more distant locations. Enthusiastically received, his plea was soon forgotten, as was his plan after the Great Fire for a London rebuilt as a more pleasant and healthier place to live.
* The floor area of St Paul’s has been estimated as being four acres so its roof with its complex of ridges and valleys may well have covered six acres.
† St Faith’s was the parish church occupying the crypt beneath St Paul’s.
‡ Stationers were booksellers and publishers whose losses were estimated at £200,000 (more than £20.5 million), possibly the greatest losses in the fire of any type of trader.
* The British named the city New York in honour of the Duke of York, Charles II’s brother who later became James II. In a trade-off with the Dutch they relinquished the nutmeg island of Run in North Maluku and the spice island of Surinam. The Dutch reclaimed the city during the third Anglo-Dutch war in 1673 and for a short while it was renamed New Orange. The following year it reverted to the British and New York became its permanent name.
* The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602 and quickly became the richest private company in the world and the first to issue shares. Trading throughout Asia, by 1669 it had over 150 merchant ships, 40 warships, 50,000 employees, a private army of 10,000 soldiers and a dividend payment of 40 per cent.
* Johan de Witt (1625–72), exceptional Dutch politician and mathematician. Intellectual, tolerant, modest and republican, he gained pre-eminence in his country purely on merit. As governor of the Republic of United Provinces he oversaw the expansion and success of the Dutch navy (the firing of the English fleet at Chatham dockyards was his idea), and also with his mathematical intelligence increased the wealth and influence of the Republic. His opponents, the Orangists, eventually took power in 1672 and he was assassinated, along with his brother Cornelis.
* Sir George Downing (1623–84), divine, politician, diplomat, financial reformer and builder of Downing Street. He was born in Dublin and educated in Massachusetts, becoming one of the first graduates at Harvard. He built the family’s fortunes on unscrupulous land deals and bribes from the East India Company while he was envoy in The Hague. Perhaps his greatest achievement was based on his experience of his time in the Netherlands, for he became the most important reformer of royal finances in the restoration period a
nd laid the foundation for the financial revolution that was to transform England into a great power.
* John Meerman, appointed Dutch envoy to Charles II’s court in September 1667.
* Count Christopher Delphicus von Dhona (1628–68) was a field marshal and Swedish ambassador. Considered by John Evelyn to be ‘a goodly person’ when he saw him in February, honoured by Charles II after this historic treaty at a state dinner in the Banqueting House. He died aged forty, just three months later.
* Thomas Clifford,1st Baron Clifford (1630–74), barrister, MP and statesman, was a prominent supporter of Arlington and promoter of war with the Dutch. He was a commissioner of the treasury 1667–73, and worked on the secret preparation for the Treaty of Dover in which Charles II promised Louis XIV of France that he would work to restore Catholicism. He was created a baron in 1672 for suggesting the infamous ‘Stop of the Exchequer’ that allowed Charles to default on his debts to the bankers and goldsmiths. Made lord treasurer the same year, he resigned in 1673 when the Test Act barred Catholics from office. He committed suicide four months later aged forty-three.
* Sir Orlando Bridgeman (c.1606–74), politician and prominent lawyer during Charles I’s reign. He was the son of a clergyman and was knighted in 1643. After Charles II’s restoration he was in charge of the trial of the regicides. As lord keeper he obstructed the king’s grants to his mistresses and opposed the notorious ‘Stop of the Exchequer’ in 1672. He was subsequently dismissed as lord keeper.
* These reduced ambassadorial allowances in today’s money would be about £114,000 for the equipage and £5,000 per week for running the embassy.
* This would be the equivalent of nearly £23,000 per annum now which does not seem to be excessive rental for a house fit for an ambassador in The Hague. It seems that rental rates have increased faster than other economic markers.
* Henry Sidney (Earl of Romney) (1641–1704) was one of the younger sons of Robert, 2nd Earl of Leicester. From 1679 to 1681 he was Charles II’s envoy to The Hague where he became a trusted friend of the Prince of Orange and in 1688 carried the invitation from the ‘Immortal Seven’ to invade England and with Princess Mary replace James II on the throne. William III made him lord lieutenant of Ireland and an earl in 1692. Known for his charm and romantic entanglements, he never married and died of smallpox in 1704.
* A Catalogue of the Valuable and Exceedingly Interesting Assemblage of Italian, Flemish and other Pictures and Some Antique Marbles, formerly collected by Sir William Temple, and brought from the Family Seat, in Surry (British Library s.c. 1518.(7.)). This sale was conducted on 30 March 1824 by Mr Christie in the London Salerooms in King Street, still used by Christie’s today. The stars of the sale were the portrait of the Renaissance intellectual Pico della Mirandola by Agnolo Bronzino, which sold for the equivalent today of £6,500, and the van Dyck portrait of Henrietta Maria, which went for the equivalent of £3,500. The portraits of Dorothy and William by Netscher are now in the National Portrait Gallery. The rest of the Temple paintings, including the Titian, went for a good deal less than £1,000 each, in today’s value, highlighting the remarkable inflation in value of Old Masters since the early nineteenth century.
* Louise XIV and Charles II followed suit, embarrassed by the crippled, begging soldiers on the streets, with l’Hôpital des Invalides in Paris, initiated in 1670, and the Royal Hospital Chelsea, whose foundation stone was laid in 1681. The hospital for injured and aged sailors was founded at Greenwich in 1694 by William III, with John Evelyn as treasurer.
* William rated Hoeft very highly and gave a delightful sketch of him in his Memoirs: ‘a generous, honest man; of great patrimonial riches, learning, wit, humour, without ambition, having always refused all employments the State had offered him, and serving only as burgomaster of his town in his turn, and as little busy in it as he could; a true genius’. He told William no man should live beyond sixty and, as he was approaching this age himself, that he would be grateful for ‘the first good occasion to die: and this he made good, dying with neglect upon a fit of the gout, talking with his friends till he was just spent, then sending them away that he might not die in their sight; and when he found himself come a little again, sending for them up, and telling them, qu’il y avoit encore pour une demy heure de conversation [that he had life still for one half-hour’s conversation]’.
* Esaias Puffendorff (1628–87), brother of the celebrated academic Samuel Puffendorff, a German professor and writer on history and the law, so highly regarded by the king of Sweden he was given a Swedish baronetcy.
* The equivalent of almost a quarter of a million pounds by today’s reckoning.
† The equivalent of about £120,000.
* Louise de Kéroualle (1649–1734) came to England in 1770 as a maid of honour to Charles II’s sister Henriette-Anne. She was created Duchess of Portsmouth in 1673, having given birth to Charles’s son on 29 July 1672. This boy became the Duke of Richmond and a possible contender for the throne.
† Eleanor (Nell) Gwyn (1642–87), actress and royal mistress, started her theatrical career selling oranges at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. A good comic actress, by 1669 she was Charles II’s mistress and bore him two sons, the elder becoming Duke of St Albans.
‡ Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, Duchess of Cleveland (1641–1709), was the niece of the powerful George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and returned with Charles from exile in 1660. She was the king’s main mistress during the 1660s and was rewarded with titles, jewels and the once magnificent Nonsuch, Henry VIII’s great palace in Surrey, built at enormous expense to rival François I’s chateau at Chambord. She subsequently dismantled it and sold it off piecemeal.
* Sir Charles Lyttelton (1629–1716), a soldier and governor of Jamaica, was knighted in 1662 and created a baron in 1693. Honest and trustworthy, he inherited the estate at Sheen from Lord Brouncker (a wizard at the gaming tables but according to John Evelyn a ‘hard, covetous, vicious man’). He was married to a distant cousin of William’s, Anne Temple, and they had many children.
* Baron Willem Joseph van Ghent (1626–72), vice-admiral and bold commander of the raid on the Medway in 1667. Involved in the Battle of Solebay in Suffolk in June 1672, when the Dutch surprised the Anglo-French fleet before they could blockade the Dutch trading routes, van Ghent was killed during the ensuing fight and after much loss of life and ships the battle ended with a marginal advantage to the Dutch who at least had prevented the blockade.
† Sir Leoline Jenkins (1623–85), judge, diplomat and secretary of state (1680–4) when he was described as ‘the most faithful drudge of a secretary’. As a judge, Pepys considered him ‘a very excellent man both for judgement, temper (yet Majesty enough), and by all men’s report – not to be corrupted’. He was knighted in 1670.
* From Virgil’s Aeneid, 6: 743; literally ‘each one suffers his own ghosts/household gods or spirits’.
CHAPTER TEN
Enough of the Uncertainty of Princes
I have had, in twenty years experience, enough of the uncertainty of Princes, the caprices of fortune, the corruption of Ministers, the violence of factions, the unsteadiness of counsels, and the infidelity of friends; nor do I think the rest of my life enough to make any new experiments.
WILLIAM TEMPLE, Memoirs
WILLIAM WAS ONLY forty-three and Dorothy one year older when they both embraced the pleasures of a private life free of the machinations of diplomacy or the glamour and malice of court life. He never lost his conviction that Britain and the United Provinces were natural allies against the overweening ambitions of France and continued to argue the case when he could. William would eventually acquiesce with reluctance to his king’s request to undertake two more missions for him. But Dorothy had always professed herself happiest with a quiet studious life in the country with those she loved. For the next few years both their energies and interests were focused on their intellectual and domestic lives at home in Sheen.
With them was th
e ever faithful Martha, now in her early thirties. She had had suitors but never entertained the slightest wish to leave the household of her brother and his family. There seems to have been a perfectly harmonious relationship with Dorothy, of whom she wrote always with affection and some awe. She also shared in the affectionate family life of the remaining Temple children, a portrait being painted of her with Diana, Dorothy and William’s only surviving daughter who, by the end of their embassy to The Hague, was six years old. Their son John was nearly sixteen and, it would seem, remained as modest and eager to please as he had been as a child, when he had been their first and beloved ‘Creeper’.
We get only glimpses of Dorothy from now on. She was such a keen reader as a young woman she was likely still to be reading voraciously and discussing the characters and intricacies of plot, whether epic romances or the classical poets she sometimes requested William to translate, just as avidly as when she and William conducted their secret courtship. She was also an accomplished needlewoman. In a letter written to William during their courtship she explained how her average summer day was filled by walking in the garden in the morning, followed by the midday meal and conversation with whoever was visiting, then after lunch, ‘The heat of the day is spent in reading or working,’1 where that work was almost certainly needlework.
A beautiful embroidered silk coverlet, most probably worked by Dorothy, still remains in her family. Her love of the country and discerning eye for the details of animal, insect and plant life is expressed in the finely delineated creatures from the tiniest bugs, woodlice, a stag beetle and butterflies to domestic animals and birds. She embroidered a particularly smug tabby cat full of character – perhaps the family pet? – a rook and golden eagle, and the occasional mythical creature and exotic elephant, its body filled in with a velour thread. The flowers and animals were stitched in glossy silks and metallic thread on to a fine ivory silk. There were pattern books from which needlewomen could copy elements of their designs but the selection and composition was individual to each embroiderer.