Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  Mary’s small and sickly son was not expected to live and she was too distraught with her own grief to care. Her detached mothering continued until her own death from smallpox, on a visit to England, ten years later. The Prince of Orange was in most respects brought up by the state and grew to be intelligent, disciplined and a good judge of character, but he remained shy and emotionally isolated. He preferred action to words and it was no coincidence that his favourite activities were hunting and war. Although William Temple was temperamentally completely different, highly adept socially, excellent with all manner of people, happier in his library or garden than riding hell-for-leather on a horse or charging into battle, he and the young prince got on together increasingly well.

  Certainly the Temple family provided Prince William with something of the family life that he had never had. He was close to John Temple in age, although much more mature in experience and the expectations that lay upon him, and William and Dorothy and the lively Martha attracted him for their intellectual conversation and affectionate relationships. Soon he was making his way to their house at The Hague as often as twice a week to share their meals and talk. In fact when the prince fell mortally ill with smallpox, the disease that had killed both his parents in their twenties and therefore hung like a spectre over his household, he had insisted he would only eat what came from William and Dorothy’s kitchens. William took this as a rare compliment to a foreigner, but his Dutch friends pointed out how dangerous it was for his family if the prince should die, a perfectly possible scenario, for ‘they believed the people would pull down our houses, and tear us all in pieces’.32 Luckily this belief was never tested and with the Temple food and the devoted nursing of Prince William’s boyhood friend, the courtier Hans Willem Bentinck,* the prince recovered. His friend, however, exhausted by his sixteen-day vigil, collapsed himself with an even more virulent form of the disease, from which he too eventually recovered to share in his prince’s future elevation to even greater power.

  Martha recalled the regular visits of the prince to the Temples’ house and how this cemented their mutual trust and friendship: ‘The Prince of Orange, who was fond of speaking English, which he had bin long disused from, & of eating their plain way, (wch Sr W T always continued abroad as well as at home) grew into soe easy & familiar conversation in his Famely yt he constantly din’d once & commonly supt twice a Week at his House … Sr W T grew so much into the Princes esteem & confidence as gave him soe great a part in what follow’d.’33

  One of the events that followed, in which the prince’s growing esteem for William was put to good use, is interesting for the light it threw on the sensibilities of William and Dorothy. This was a time when the aristocracy and gentry in general were not particularly concerned about the prevalence of severe punishments or common injustices towards working-class men and women. The Temple family heard from their servants a story of how five Englishmen, mercenaries in the Dutch army, had been brought to The Hague, quickly tried by a military tribunal and condemned to death for desertion. Dorothy and William’s servants had managed to speak to the men and returned with ‘ye deplorable story … it seem’d to be a mistake, & that they were all to dye innocent … they were to be shot in the wood next morning’. The detail that their graves were already being dug seemed particularly poignant in the telling and emphasised the futility of any hope of reprieve, especially as the ultimate authority, the Prince of Orange, was out of town.

  William was propelled into action by the urgency of the situation, his sister remembering how ‘[he] left nothing unattempted to helpe them, sent to ye officers, yt had condemn’d them, threaten’d to complaine first to the Prince, & then to ye King [Charles] who he was sure would demand reparation’. None of this worked and Martha recalled how much the plight of these men upset them all making it impossible to sleep: ‘Never night pass’d more unquietly in Sr W T famely’. In a last-ditch attempt to save the men, William pleaded with the officers to defer the execution for one day so that he could get word to the prince. Not only was this request granted but William of Orange ordered the men’s release. After first visiting their graves in the wood, perhaps as a terrible reminder of how close they had come to death, they turned up at William and Dorothy’s house and sank to their knees before their ambassador. This was ‘a very moveing sight’34 for all the family, Martha wrote, a sign of respect and gratitude that was repeated by the ex-prisoners in the streets of The Hague every time they came upon William or Dorothy, Martha or even the children – somewhat to their surprise.

  The Temple family and their English servants did not doubt the innocence of the men, although on their eventual return to England they seem to have spent some time in the Tower. Martha explained the emotional reaction in William and Dorothy’s family to the commonplace tragedy of these men’s fates to the fact that patriotism and fellow feeling for one’s countrymen was intensified when abroad.

  If the intimacy of the Temple family’s relationship with William of Orange had allowed them to save these five men’s lives then it also encouraged the prince to ask for advice in the choice of his wife. William Temple was already aware of the talk at home about the possibility of uniting the Stuarts, in the form of Charles II’s niece, Mary, and the house of Orange, the prince already being half Stuart. Parliament seemed keen to strengthen the Protestant influence at a time when the king’s brother and heir, the Duke of York and future James II, was intent on taking as his second wife the Catholic Mary of Modena. But his eldest daughter Mary at this time was only twelve and the prince had other more pressing concerns on his mind, such as the continuing war with France. There was a suspicion among his own people too that by marrying into the more powerful British royal family he might lose some of his independence and be tainted by their corrupt morals and crypto-Catholicism.

  However there were advantages in the match for the young embattled prince, and over the next year or so he considered them. Such a marriage he hoped would bind Britain in closer and more permanent alliance with his country. It would also propel him into sight of the British throne, for Charles II had not managed to produce any legitimate children and James, his brother and heir, by the mid-1670s had only daughters, the eldest of whom was Mary.

  Although the armistice was still not concluded and Prince William was about to go off on campaign again, he turned for fatherly advice to William, requesting he speak to him ‘as a friend, or at least as an indifferent person, and not as the King’s Ambassador’. In early April 1676 they met in the prince’s beautiful gardens at Honslaerdyke and spent two hours talking, probably as they strolled up and down the terraces and avenues of trees, enjoying the spring air. Prince William was open and affectingly frank with the man whose own honesty and straightforwardness he had grown to trust. To him he admitted having two concerns: the first was how removed Charles and his court had become from the true feelings of his people. The recent war against the Dutch had been an example of policy quite at odds with popular feeling and there was anxiety among the prince’s advisers, he said, that this alienation could have ended in some real disturbance, even revolution. It had happened before, and once the genie was out of the bottle its energy could not be denied. William reassured the prince ‘the Crown of England stood upon surer foundations than ever it had done in former times, and the more for what had passed in the last reign’.

  His second concern was with the character of the woman he chose as a wife. William was rather touched by the young man’s self-knowledge and candour: he told him how he recognised that, as a prince, he was not meant to care about the personal qualities of his future wife, such things not being considered important, but they were to him, and very much so. He was afraid that the kind of eligible young women he met in foreign courts did not exhibit the qualities necessary to live happily with him. With such enormous military commitments and the demands of governance he feared he could not cope with domestic discord too: ‘if he should meet with one to give him trouble at home, it was what he shou
ld not be able to bear, who was like to have enough [trouble] abroad in the course of his life’.35 He then asked what William knew of the nature and education of Lady Mary.

  William’s response was to pass the buck to Dorothy: ‘I could say nothing to it, but that I had always heard my wife and my sister speak with all the advantage that could be of what they could discern in a Princess so young, and more from what they had been told by the governess, with whom they had a particular friendship, and who, they were sure, took all the care that could be in so much of education as fell to her share.’36

  Prince William was so encouraged by this talk that within three days he had prepared letters to both Charles and James, the uncle and father of his hoped-for bride, asking for permission to come to England and seek her hand once he had finished the current military campaign. Dorothy, who was due to go to London to sort out William’s affairs again, probably chasing up the usual arrears, set off immediately on her journey carrying the letters to the king and with Prince William’s exhortations in her ears, that ‘during her stay there, [she] should endeavour to inform herself the most particularly she could of all that concerned the person, humour, and dispositions of the young Princess, in which he seemed so much concerned’.37

  While Dorothy travelled to England on her match-making mission, William together with his sister Martha and daughter Diana set off in July 1676 for Nijmegen. This was the ancient Dutch town he had suggested for the conference he hoped would finally end the multinational war that was still spluttering bloodily across Europe. What was fundamentally a Franco-Dutch war had involved also Spain, Münster, Sweden, Denmark, Brandenburg, the Holy Roman Empire and Britain, which had signed its own Westminster Treaty, steered by William, two years previously. This was the beginning of a drawn-out and frustrating affair that would result in a prolonged series of peace treaties, the first only signed in the summer of 1678 and the rest over the next eighteen months: all this expense, tedium and effort in the end failing to bring lasting peace.

  John Aubrey predicted that nothing lasting would come of the negotiations due to adverse astrological configurations: ‘I remember that very time they went away was opposition of Saturn and Mars.’ It was considered so malefic to have Saturn, the planet of frustration and grim reapings, opposed by Mars, the planet of strife and war, that Aubrey felt certain of his prediction: ‘I sayd then … that if that Ambassade came to any good I would never trust to Astrologie again.’38 Indeed he could not have been more prescient, for the proceedings were reduced to fiasco by pettifogging complaints over protocol and precedence, while increasingly futile battles continued to erupt fitfully across Europe.

  As the British ambassador, together with his colleagues Sir Leoline Jenkins and the ex-ambassador to France, Lord Berkeley, William presided over these negotiations. He had always liked to proceed in an informal and straightforward way, priding himself on the speed with which he concluded peace treaties, aware always of the unnecessary killing, waste and destruction that continued while diplomats quibbled. As the mediator, his own country officially neutral, he was involved in endless and exhausting shuttling back and forth between the various protagonists, interpreting messages, pleading terms and persuading the obstinate and intractable. His personal qualities of even-handedness and optimism were stretched to the limit by the shenanigans of the other diplomats whose own national armies and navies were still spasmodically engaged in bloody combat that made the struggle for peace seem futile.

  In June the following year, in the middle of this protracted enterprise, William and Dorothy’s son John arrived from England carrying letters from the Earl of Danby, his mother’s ambitious cousin, by then lord treasurer. The king requested that William return home and succeed Henry Coventry as secretary of state, a post Coventry would relinquish for the price of £10,000* – although Charles said he would help William out and pay half. William wrote immediately to Danby explaining once again that he had no spare cash to lay down until he inherited on his father’s death. He also pointed out that he would rather stay in the current post and finish his job at Nijmegen. By express the king’s messenger arrived with ‘his Majesty’s commands to repair immediately over in a yacht which he had sent on purpose for me’.

  William, his son and sister set off immediately, leaving Dorothy and their daughter Diana maintaining Temple family interests in Nijmegen while they were gone. Dorothy, both in Brussels and here, seemed to be his partner in diplomacy, trusted by William and esteemed by the officials with whom her husband had more formal dealings. When William was ushered into Charles’s presence he continued to argue against being propelled into becoming secretary, despite the fact that the king declared there was no one else fit for the job. To this he replied, ‘I could name two in a breath that I would undertake should make better Secretaries of State than I.’ The king obviously knew his ambassador well and recognised a certain fatigue and tetchiness after the hurried journey and a year spent already on a thankless and Sisyphean task: ‘Go, get you gone to Sheen,’ he said good-humouredly, ‘we shall have no good of you till you have been there; and when you have rested yourself, come up again.’39

  William did as he was told and headed off immediately for his longed-for refuge. Despite what he considered as Charles’s disastrous susceptibility to French influence, the sorry vacillations of foreign policy, the distasteful frivolity and decadence of his court, William was always touched by his king’s personableness, his largeness of character, his generosity and warmth, and his sense of humour and genuine charm. William did not find his heart going out in the same way to the Prince of Orange but instead admired him much more for all the resolution, honesty and focus that his own king lacked. In his memoirs he wrote an insightful character sketch of Charles as he found him that day in the summer of 1677, in his late forties, his dashing days behind him and disappointments crowding in.

  I never saw him in better humour, nor ever knew a more agreeable conversation when he was so; and where he was pleased to be familiar, great quickness of conception, great pleasantness of wit, with great variety of knowledge, more observation and truer judgement of men, than one would have imagined by so careless and easy a manner as was natural to him in all he said and did. From his own temper, he desired nothing but to be easy himself, and that every body else should be so; and would have been glad to see the least of his subjects pleased, and to refuse no man what he asked. But this softness of temper made him apt to fall into the persuasions of whoever had his kindness and confidence for the time … so as nothing looked steady in the conduct of his affairs, nor aimed at a certain end. Yet sure no Prince has more qualities to make him loved, with a great many to make him esteemed, and all without a grain of pride or vanity in his whole constitution: nor can he suffer flattery in any kind, growing uneasy upon the first approaches of it, and turning it off to something else. [William, thinking of Charles’s squandering of the advantages of the Triple Alliance, continued] But this humour has made him lose many great occasions of glory to himself, and greatness to his Crown, which the conjunctures of his reign conspired to put into his hand; and have made way for the aspiring thoughts and designs of a neighbour Prince (Louis XIV).40

  The treaty negotiations stagnated during the summer and the Prince of Orange was still on campaign, adamant that he would not accept the disadvantageous terms being offered after French military successes in the field. For William, the gossip of his own king’s court, the stalled treaty, the continuing war, all seemed very far away as he restored his health and good spirits in the verdant confines of his garden, with only the pleasures of harvesting and eating his much loved fruit to concern him. He wrote to his father in Dublin: ‘I am, I thank God, in an easy place here at Sheen, where I spend all the time I can possibly, and never saw any thing pleasanter than my garden, and the country and river about it, which I was grown almost a stranger to.’41 He added how he wished his father could make a visit and see the wonderful improvements to which his money had contributed, but he
realised the old man would never see them now.

  William also managed at some point a trip to Paris for pleasure in which he spent much time with the Duc de Chevreuse, a younger man than William and a moderate at Louis XIV’s court. This anecdote, recalled by the great memoir writer Saint-Simon,* povides a revealing glimpse of William’s individuality (and appreciation of French cuisine) in action:

  They met one morning in the gallery at Versailles and set to arguing about machines and mechanics. The Duke, who forgot all sense of time when he was arguing, held him so long that the clock struck two. At this chime, Temple interrupted Chevreuse, and taking him by the arm, said: ‘I assure you, Sir, that of all machines I know none so fine, at this hour, as a revolving spit, and I’ll be off now at the double to try its effect.’ He turned his back on him and left him astonished that he could think of dining.

  Saint-Simon added that ‘Ministers as straightforward as this are rare indeed. One has never heard such said about ours.’42

  By September Charles offered the Prince of Orange fairer terms that were not dictated by Louis XIV and appealed to him more. Breaking off from warfare for a while, he was prepared to come to England to discuss them with his uncle. However, uppermost in his mind was the opportunity to meet Lady Mary and see whether she lived up to Dorothy’s report on the young woman’s character and intelligence. Despite the Duke of York’s reservations about marrying his daughter to such a stalwart Protestant when he much preferred an alliance with a Catholic prince, the impatient young man was in no mood for equivocation.