Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  * The equivalent of over £800,000.

  * These were slang terms that originally focused on Protestant or Catholic sympathies. The Whigs were named for the Whiggamore raid of rebellious Presbyterians on Edinburgh in 1648 (Scots whiggamore meaning a horse driver). The Tories (Irish Gaelic toraidhe, meaning a fugitive) were originally Catholic Irish dispossessed after their rebellion of 1641. Although each term was chosen as an insult for their enemies, both became legitimate descriptions: up to the mid-nineteenth century in Britain when the Whig Party became the Liberal Party and in America there was a distinct Whig Party (1833–60); Tory is still a term used for the modern Conservative Party.

  * Horace I, 18 lines, 109–16 omitting line 110

  Me quoties reficit gelidus Digentia rivus,

  Quid sentire putas,quid credis,amice,precari?

  Sit mihi,quod nunc est,etiam minus,ut mihi vivam

  Quod superest aevi,si quid superesse volunt Di.

  Sit bona librorum,et provisae frugis in annum

  Copia,ne fluitem dubiae spe pendulus horae,

  Hoc satis est orasse Jovem,qui donat et aufert.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Taking Leave of All Those Airy Visions

  The oake in the fable had a much stronger root than the reeds that grew near it, but the storm tore what resisted it, and what yielded was safe. It is an admirable saying that we are as clay in the hands of the potter. We are certainly soe with respect to God’s absolute power and our own weaknesse, but we ought to be so too in pleasantnesse [complaisance] to his designes.

  DOROTHY OSBORNE, letter to a nephew on the death of his wife, 1683

  And so I take leave of all those airy visions which have so long busied my head about mending the world; and, at the same time, of all those shining toys or follies that employ the thoughts of busy men: and shall turn mine wholly to mend myself

  WILLIAM TEMPLE, Memoirs

  DESPITE THE PLEASURES of retirement and the deep consolation of his garden, William was prone to say ‘how happy his life had bin if it had ended at fifety’. This statement of complex meanings was recorded by his sister who believed that the personal tragedies that thereafter befell both him and Dorothy derailed ‘the train of good fortune, wch though he lost seven children before almost all in their cradle, still made him pass for soe fortunate a man’.1 The first wrecker of this contentment came in the spring of 1679 when William was fifty and still on the right side of happiness. Their beloved thirteen-year-old daughter Diana fell ill while the family was at Sheen. William, however, was in the middle of fraught negotiations with Charles II to set up the Privy Council, of which he was to be a member, and his presence was clamoured for in London. With great reluctance he left Dorothy with their ailing daughter, ‘a child he was infinitely fond of’ and a lively and charming presence at the centre of the family. It was soon found that Diana had indeed succumbed to the long feared scourge of smallpox: before her fourteenth birthday she was dead.

  William’s friends in London had thought that keeping him away from home ‘might divert the trouble from seising so much upon him’.2 But there was no way of deflecting the grief that engulfed the family. Less than two months later, William wrote to an unknown correspondent apologising for his tardiness in responding: ‘The truth is, my heart is so broken with a blow I received in the most sensible part of it that I have done nothing since as I should do, and I fear never shall again.’3

  A portrait painted of Diana with her aunt Martha, not long before she died, showed an exquisite dark-eyed girl who looked much like her father. In William’s papers was a letter from his daughter, written to him in Holland in the November before her death, and superscribed by him ‘My Di’. She had just moved into her new bedroom after the refurbishment of their house was finished and was excited about gifts sent to her by her father, possibly clothes, material and decorative items from the great East India warehouses in The Hague. It showed the lively affection, intelligence and mischievous sense of humour of a well-loved child, her father’s inscription with that possessive pronoun and the pet name he and Dorothy used for her revealing the pain and finality of their loss:

  Sir,

  I defer’d writing to you till I could tell you that I had receaved all my fine things, which I have just now done; but I thought never to have done giving you thanks for them – they have made me soe very happy in my new closet, and euery body that comes dose admire them aboue all things, but yett not soe much as I think they deserve; and now, if Papa was here I should think myself a perfect pope, though I hope I should not be burnt, as there was one at Nell guin’s [Gwyn’s] doore the 5th of November, who was sat in a great cheare, with a red nose half a yard long, with some hundreds of boys throwing squibs at it. monsieur gore [her tutor?] and I agree mighty well, and he makes me belieue I shall come to something at last: that is if he stays, which I don’t doubt but he will, because all the faire ladys will petition for him. we are got rid of the workmen now, and our howse is redy to entertain you come when you please, and you will meet with no body more glad to see you then [than]

  Sr.,

  your most obedient

  and dutiful daughter,

  D. TEMPLE

  Nothing survives to show how Dorothy coped with the agony of this loss. Diana had been her only surviving daughter, and a child who seemed to belong close to all their hearts. Dorothy had sat in long watch by her father’s bedside as his health slowly failed and she would have devoted herself also to her daughter’s care, hoping against hope that she would recover from the painful and disfiguring disease that too often proved fatal. Did she relive her own fear twenty-five years before when the same disease had nearly destroyed her as she stood at last on the threshold of married life? Did William also recall his own dreadful vigil by her side when he thought happiness would be denied them, just as it was within reach?

  Dorothy had described her conviction as a young woman that her life would be one of extremes, expecting ecstasy to be countered by the plunge of despair. She also wrote of her naturally melancholy turn of mind that expected good fortune to be balanced by ill in some unavoidable symmetry. The emotional hardships of her early life had made her fear that every person she loved or occasion she longed for would in the end be lost or spoiled. As a young woman watching her aged father resist death she had marvelled at the zest for life that seemed to surface above all disability and suffering. He was an old man who had led a full and honourable life, he expected to go to heaven and find some eternal reward for his virtue on earth, and yet he still clung to his painful mortal existence:

  Wee complaine of this world and the Variety of Crosses and afflictions it abound’s in, and yet for all this whoe is weary on’t (more than in discourse), whoe thinks with pleasure of leaving it, or preparing for the next; Wee see olde folks that have ou[t]lived all the comforts of life, desyre to continue it, and nothing can wean us from the ffolly of preffering a mortall beeing subject to great infirmity’s and unavoydable decays, before an immmortall one and all the Glorry’s that are promised with it.4

  How different and much more cruel it was to see her beautiful young daughter struggle to remain in the world, with all her promise still before her, and ultimately fail. Always more naturally devout than William, Dorothy certainly seemed to have turned increasingly to her faith for support through the trials of her life. She had long admired Jeremy Taylor, the inspired cleric whose humanistic Christianity was expressed with eloquence in a number of highly popular and significant works.

  In The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and its companion, Holy Dying, he was concerned with helping his fellow men and women live thoughtful lives as close to God as possible, with the overriding purpose to fulfil their human and divine destinies. Dorothy had read Holy Living when she was a young woman and had paraphrased, in a letter to William, Taylor’s arguments about relinquishing one’s will to a greater power. She also tried to incorporate his teachings in her own approach to life and wrote how the only way to cope with mi
sfortune was by ‘submitting to that which wee cannot avoyde and by yeelding to It, break the force of a blowe which if resisted brings a certain Ruine’. Certainly running throughout her letters was a sense that it was dangerous to love worldly things too passionately, including other humankind, for such intensity of love should be reserved for God alone, and divine justice would demand retribution for such parochial indulgence: ‘it was therefore made my punishment, to let mee see that how innocent soever I thought my affection, it was guilty, in being greater then is allowable for things of this world.’5 Punished for loving too much, as she may have believed herself to be, Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying would have given her some consolation with the certainty that heaven was the destination for the soul of innocents, expressed in his powerful poetic imagery, where suffering is replaced with a shining path through parted clouds to glory:

  then the sorrows of the sickness, and the flames of the fever, or the faintness of the consumption, do but untie the soul from its chain, and let it go forth, first into liberty, and then to glory: for it is but for a little while that the face of the sky was black, like the preparations of the night, but quickly the cloud was torn and rent, the violence of thunder parted it into little portions, that the sun might look forth with a watery eye, and then shine without a tear.6

  On the urging of Dorothy, five years before, William had written a long letter-essay to the Countess of Essex, whose only daughter had died aged nine. She was suffering a grief so extreme and prolonged that her friends and family feared for her life. To begin with William reiterated much of Taylor’s advice about submitting one’s will to God and trusting in the divine purpose behind everything, even the tragedy of a child’s death. Then his sanguine logic gave way and the letter overflowed with tragic feeling: ‘could tears water the lovely plant, so as to make it grow again after once it is cut down; would sighs furnish new breath, or could it draw life and spirits from the wasting of yours … alas! The eternal laws of the creation extinguish all such hopes, forbid all such designs.’7 He had been thinking no doubt of the deaths of his own children and the sense of shock and disbelief when a vital living spark is snuffed out and no amount of grief and love and human will can rekindle it.

  He attempted an intellectual approach to coping with the pain of loss, but failed to stifle these convulsive emotions with reason. Rather he saw the effects of grief like a slow suicide and his words were unexpectedly full of tragic experience: ‘is the crime much less to kill ourselves by a slow poison, than by a sudden wound? Now, if we do it, and know we do it, by a long and continual grief, can we think ourselves innocent? What great difference is there if we break our hearts, or consume them; if we pierce them, or bruise them; since all determines in the same death, as all arises from the same despair?’8

  Both he and Dorothy believed it was right to struggle against overwhelming emotion. Martha, writing of her brother at this terrible time, explained his attitude to grief and the necessity, as he saw it, to be strong so he could support others, ‘in this & all other accidents (for he was yet reserv’d for greater tryals) his reason after some struggle was alwayes the master, & he was not so well able to teach and comfort his friends [and family] in all such uncomfortable accidents without haveing the same power over himselfe.’9 Dorothy, too, struggled to cling to her rational, intellectual self and not be swept away in a rip tide of emotion. In one of her early letters to William she explained her retreat from further pain: ‘tis the result of a longe Strife with my selfe, before my Reason could overcome my passion, or bring mee to a perfect Resignation to whatsoever is alotted for mee’.10 Religion helped her endure, for she did believe that whatever happened to her was God’s will and there was a purpose in everything, however painful, however hidden.

  The garden always beckoned as a place of consolation. For Dorothy it provided an early morning stroll and the chance for reverie before the day had really begun. The summer scents of jasmine, honeysuckle and roses were so timeless the past and present merged as one and griefs grew lighter for a while. For William it was hard to remain despairing for long where he considered himself, he wrote, like Virgil’s blessed gardener, the old man of Corycus: ‘Regum aequabat opes animis* [He equalled the wealth of kings in his mind] That in the midst of these small possessions, upon a few acres of barren ground, yet he equalled all the wealth and opulence of Kings, in the ease, content, and freedom of his mind.’11

  With one’s modest acres in hand, he believed, ‘the most exquisite delights of sense are pursued, in the contrivance and plantation of gardens; which, with fruits, flowers, shades, fountains, and the music of the birds that frequent such happy places, seem to furnish all the pleasures of the several senses, and with the greatest, or at least the most natural perfections’.12 Ever changing, always new, the turning year revealed the consoling cycle of death, rebirth and renewal, culminating in autumn and the longed-for harvest of delicious fruits.

  Although William did not go to London for the first five years of his retirement he was visited often by friends and old colleagues and always attended the king when he came to neighbouring Richmond. However, Dorothy was less reclusive and they kept on their London house in Pall Mall so she could stay there and enjoy what the city had to offer. Pall Mall had been laid out in 1661 on the site of an old pall mall alley,* replacing the ancient highway from Charing Cross to St James’s Park. Grand new houses had been built in the fields along its length and the Temples took a lease on a twenty-eight-foot frontage on the south side. Their neighbours, among others, included the actress and royal mistress Nell Gwyn and their landlord the Earl of St Albans, a dissolute courtier, gambler and property developer who, pro-French, had encouraged Charles II in the duplicity of the Treaty of Dover that scuppered the Triple Alliance. In the 1680s Pall Mall was further developed, with more domestic housing, together with shops and a coffee house. It was considered an extremely convenient location ‘because of its Vicinity to the Queen’s Palace, the Park, the Parliament-House, the Theatres, and the Chocolate and Coffee Houses where the best Company frequents’.13 Dorothy could take advantage of all these attractions when she was in town but William had little desire for any further worldly diversion.

  His refusal to travel the fifteen or so miles to London expressed not only the pleasures of home but also a kind of pique in him at how, at the end of his distinguished professional career, his king and colleagues had treated him so shabbily. Although William protested he would never abase himself for honours and valued his freedom of action and thought far more than any financial reward, he asserted this often enough to make it clear he was disappointed that more conventional recognition of his role in the nation’s life at home and abroad did not come his way. Men were awarded peerages for far less but William’s views on foreign policy and his high moral tone of naive probity and frankness in all his dealings was jarringly at odds with Charles and his court at the time. William was the conscience of a government that did not care to see its faults revealed in quite such an uncompromising light. His sister remarked on how his volatile temperament was easily depressed in contemplating how his efforts for king and country had been thwarted and misunderstood.

  However, age certainly softened all the blows that had so pained him when young. Gout had put an end to his enjoyment of tennis; if William lived by his own precepts then he had also given up romantic love although he still brought passion to his arguments and the devotion he felt for his family. ‘He grew lazy, & easier in his humor as he grew older,’ Martha wrote, adding how often William declared his own happiness in a wife who loved him all his life. His sister also recalled the simple pleasures he derived at Sheen from the everyday: ‘the entertainments of his life were the conversation of his friends [and family], and scenes he had made pleasant about him in his garden & House, rideing and walking were the exercises he was most pleas’d with after he had given over tennis, & when he was disabled from those too by the gout, pass’d much of the time in aireing in his coach that was not spent in his
closet.’14

  Gout was an excruciatingly painful condition that seemed to afflict most of the middle-aged gentlemen of the time. It was seen then as a disease of the wealthy and self-indulgent, rich foods and too much wine being blamed for its onset.* William wrote: ‘Among all the diseases to which the intemperance of this age disposes it (at least in these northern climates), I have observed none to increase so much … as the gout, nor any I think of worse consequence to mankind; because it falls generally upon persons engaged in public affairs and great employments.’15 He pointed out how rarely it was found among the ‘rough and the poor, such as labour for meat, and eat only for hunger; that drink water, either pure, or but discoloured with malt’.16

  The selective nature of gout gave William grounds for the interesting claim that the health and success of a nation was in direct correlation to the health of its rulers. A statement more obviously true for autocracies, but relevant too in the most modern types of democracy: ‘I have seen the counsels of a noble country grow bold or timorous, according to the fits of his good or ill health that managed them, and the pulse of the government beat high or low with that of the Governor: and this unequal conduct makes way for great accidents in the world: nay, I have often reflected upon the counsels and fortunes of the greatest Monarchies, rising and decaying sensibly with the ages and healths of the Princes and chief officers that governed them.’17 And gout, with its annihilating pain that distracted the mind and disabled the body, was the main disease to infect the governance of nations, he declared: a cure was thus a matter of state importance even more than personal relief.