by Jane Dunn
William’s gout appeared suddenly in the classic site, his big toe, while he was in Holland and he blamed it in part on the damp climate, for, proud of his general abstemiousness in matters of food and drink, he bridled at the popular view that sufferers of the disease were guilty of greed and excess. While in Holland he had made the acquaintance of the Prince of Orange’s secretary, Constantijn Huygens de Zulichem,* son of the celebrated poet and composer Sir Constantijn Huygens the elder, and brother of the famous scientist, astronomer, mathematician and horologist Christiaan Huygens. Constantijn junior had drawn not only William’s attention, but also that of the Royal Society in London, to a fascinating treatise on the treatment of gout through the burning of moxa. This was an Asian practice where little pyramidical pellets of a special herb were lit on the offending joint and burned right down to the skin, a treatment experienced by the Dutch in the East Indies and introduced into Holland and then the rest of Europe.
William was one of the first European guinea pigs and in his essay ‘Of the Cure of the Gout by Moxa’, he explained how vile, and indeed violent, were the many traditional attempts at curing this debilitating disease: cutting, beating with nettles until the skin blistered, steeping the offending leg in boiled horse manure, being just part of the battery used against it. Burning the offending joint once, twice, three or even four times with an exotic herb seemed to be no worse than what was traditionally on offer and so William gave it a go. The treatment was painful but not as bad as the gout itself, he wrote, and it allowed him to walk again immediately although the swelling of his foot took longer to disperse. In recognition of the need of further evidence before he could claim it as a cure he looked to the experiences of other men of his acquaintance. After collating his anecdotal evidence he wrote that moxibustion was successful with all gouts except the most inveterate, but he recognised that diet and abstinence from excessive alcohol played a central part too. His gout did return sporadically and increasingly with age but he had determined that anyone who really wished to be as free as possible of ‘the enemy’, as he called it, had to eat simple foods and drink sparingly. In fact his essay contained a great paean to temperance that showed the Temple style in full flight:
Temperance, that virtue without pride, and fortune without envy, that gives indolence of body, and tranquillity of mind; the best guardian of youth, and support of old age; the precept of reason, as well as religion; and physician of the soul, as well as the body; the tutelar Goddess of health, and universal medicine of life, that clears the head, and cleanses the blood, that eases the stomach, and purges the bowels, that strengthens the nerves, enlightens the eyes, and comforts the heart: in a word [my italics], that secures and perfects the digestion, and thereby avoids the fumes and winds to which we owe the colic and spleen; those crudities and sharp humours that feed the scurvy and the gout, and those slimy dregs, out of which the [kidney] gravel and stone are formed within us; diseases by which we often condemn ourselves to greater torments and miseries of life, than have perhaps been yet invented by anger or revenge, or inflicted by the greatest tyrants upon the worst of men.18
With his declining health and the grief of Diana’s death, William had no regrets at leaving his public life behind. Louis XIV, the king whose power he had always feared and through diplomacy tried to neutralise, had continued his bellicose policies aimed at expanding France’s borders, territories and influence, unchecked by Britain. By the early 1680s Louis was at his most powerful and his country increasingly wealthy. French forces had moved into Luxembourg, Strasbourg and Casale so they could dominate the Po valley in northern Italy; French colonies were multiplying across the globe while, domestically, the king was busy gathering more power into his own hands by diminishing the autonomy and authority of the Church and the fractious nobility. In 1682 Louis moved himself and his court into the spectacularly enlarged Chateau de Versailles, awe-inspiring in its scale, opulent and glamorous enough to intimidate every visiting king or ambassador. In his drive to unify the country through religious uniformity, persecution of the Jews and the Huguenots began too during this time and thousands of highly skilled people emigrated to Great Britain and the Netherlands, to their adopted countries’ lasting advantage.
As the Sun King reached his apogee, Charles II’s reign was drawing to its close. The general antagonism to his alliances with France and suspicions as to his own religious allegiances had been focused in the fight for the Exclusion Bill, a result of the hysteria surrounding the complex fabrications of the Popish Plot. Another conspiracy of dubious provenance, the Rye House Plot of 1683 to assassinate Charles and his brother James on their way back from the Newmarket races, suddenly undermined this obstinate Exclusionist sentiment. The chief Whig members of parliament who had opposed the Catholic James becoming king were now threatened with arrest, trial and execution. They were convicted by Judge George Jeffreys* who was to become notorious after the Monmouth rebellion of 1685 for his enthusiastic hanging of the rebels in the ‘Bloody Assizes’ and wholesale transportation of the rest to the West Indies. Lord William Russell** and Algernon Sidney,† long an acquaintance of William Temple’s, were among those executed. William’s old friend the Earl of Essex, a prominent supporter of the Exclusion Bill but probably ignorant of the Rye House Plot, was also arrested and committed suicide in prison. Charles’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, together with the leader of the Whig opposition, Lord Shaftesbury,‡ fled into exile in the Netherlands, where they were welcomed by William of Orange. With the opposition in disarray the king was able at last to brush aside the Exclusion Bill and reinstate his brother James in the Privy Council and, crucially, as his heir.
During this political upheaval and the deaths of friends, William was at Sheen, writing his memoirs, together possibly with his essay ‘Of Popular Discontents’, inspired by his varied diplomatic experiences. He was thinking too of these latest plots and the injustices born of fear and repression: of how only the reasonable man is ready to fit himself to the world while the unreasonable, independent and inventive expects the world to change; of how only these men (and women) force progress, but often at great cost to themselves:
The most speculative men are the most forecasting and most reflecting: and, the more ingenious men are, they are the more apt to [cause] trouble [for] themselves. From this original fountain issue those streams of faction, that, with some course of time and accidents, overflow the wisest constitutions of government and laws, and many times treat the best Princes and truest Patriots, like the worst tyrants and most seditious disturbers of their country, and bring such men to scaffolds, that deserved statues, to violent and untimely deaths, that were worthy of the longest and the happiest lives.19
Natural phenomena, so often seen as portents of ill, and climatic extremes that destroyed people’s livelihoods and unsettled their view of a fixed world, were also prevalent during this time. From April to the beginning of July in 1681 a long drought gripped the land, destroying the early growth of plants and crops and the grazing for animals. Then the following year a great comet visible to the naked eye was seen trailing its tail across the sky. No one knew then that this was a comet that periodically returned; all that was suspected was that it was a warning of some great and usually calamitous event. But the astronomer Edmund Halley* was also watching its progress and noted that its characteristics matched those of two earlier comets, one in 1531, described by Apianus, and the other in 1607, by Kepler in Prague, a period of between seventy-five to seventy-six years apart. Surmising these were sightings of the same comet, he worked out that the comet that everyone had wondered at in 1682 would return by 1757/8. He did not live to see himself proved right but his comet continued its periodic visitation, but now as Halley’s Comet, ensuring lasting honour for his calculations and his name.*
There was no national disaster, although so ferocious was the battle between the court party (the Tories) and the country party (the Whigs) and so volatile the atmosphere caused by the various ru
mours of plot and counter-plot that some actually feared Charles would set the army against parliament and another civil war would ensue. Instead the coldest winter in living memory descended on the country towards the end of 1683 and the freezing air dissipated fears of war. There was inevitable superstition that such a meteorological freak was a sign of trouble to come:
Though such unusual Frosts to us are strange,
Perhaps it may predict some greater Change;
And some do fear may a fore-runner be
Of an approaching sad Mortality.20
But quick to capitalise on the advantages of such a rare occurrence, resourceful Londoners set about constructing a Frost Fair that was to become famous as a second city of stalls and trades and exuberant entertainments set up on the solidly frozen River Thames. The deep freeze started at the beginning of December 1683 and lasted two months until 4 February. An enterprising printer set up his press and published a print of the Frost Fair in 1684, charging 3 pence for each copy. Attached was a verse bursting with the vitality of a contemporary report from the merry scene:
Behold the Wonder of this present Age,
A Famous RIVER now become a Stage.
Question not what I now Thames declare to you,
The Thames is now both Fair and Market too,
And many Thousands dayly do resort,
There to behold the Pastime and the Sport
Early and late, used by young and old,
And valu’d not the fierceness of the Cold.
…
Thousands and Thousands to the River flocks,
Where mighty flakes of Ice do lye like Rocks.
There may you see the Coaches swiftly run,
As if beneath the Ice were Waters none;
And sholes of People every where there be,
Just like to Herrings in the brackish Sea;
…
See on the Rocky Ice a Working-PRINTER,
Who hopes by his own Art to reap some gain,
Which he perchance does think he may obtain.
Here is also a Lottery and Musick too,
Yea, a cheating, drunken, leud, and debauch’d crew.
Hot Codlins, Pancakes, Duck, Goose, and Sack,
Rabit, Capon, Hen, Turkey, and a wooden Jack.
…
There is Bull-baiting and Bear-baiting too.
That no Man living yet e’re found so true;
And Foot-Ball play is there so common grown,
That on the Thames before was never known
…
Men do on Horse-back ride from shore to shore,
Which formerly in Boats were wafted o’re:
…
There roasted was a great and well-fed Oxe,
And there, with Dogs, Hunted the cunning Fox;
Dancing o’th’Ropes, and Puppit-Plays likewise,
The like before ue’r seen beneath the Skies.21
Dorothy and Martha almost certainly came to London to stay in the Pall Mall house that winter and shared some of the excitement of the Frost Fair. It was so popular and well-attended that traders and shopkeepers could get away with charging a penny more for goods and services sold on the frozen river than in the more conventional city streets. The novelty of it all added an element of lightheartedness and fantasy that normal life lacked:
Such merry Fancies ne’r were on the Land;
There is such Whimsies on the Frozen Ice,
Makes some believe the Thames a Paradice.22
By the following February 1685, the winter was not as freakishly cold and the fifty-four-year-old Charles II seemed in good health, with the Whig opposition largely defeated. The king’s situation seemed more secure than it had been for a decade when suddenly he fell violently ill. His doctors, desperate to save him, administered the torture of red-hot irons to his shaved skull and feet, bleeding him, cauterising and blistering him. But nothing could save him from what is now known to have been kidney failure. A priest was smuggled in to his bedchamber to receive him into the Roman Catholic Church and deliver the Last Rites. Within four days of his collapse he was dead.
The king’s decline was so rapid and his death so completely unexpected that for a while the court and country were in a state of shock. This and the bloody fallout of the Rye House Plot, when the leading opposition to his brother as king were exiled, cowed or executed, meant James II succeeded relatively smoothly to the throne. In the summer, the Duke of Monmouth, Charles’s illegitimate son, arrived back from his Dutch exile and attempted a rising in the West Country but was easily defeated at Sedgemoor in Somerset. He was tried for treason and executed on Tower Hill on 15 July and his followers left to the merciless Judge Jeffreys and hanged.
Charles had been welcomed back from exile with such genuine excitement and affection from his people that his reign began on a tidal wave of love and high expectations. But the catastrophes of plague, the Great Fire, wars and his own personal weaknesses and the corruption of those around him, dissipated even the most ardent of royalist support. John Evelyn wrote an appreciation of the king, in the shocked aftermath of his death, that echoed William’s own view and that of most thoughtful contemporaries:
A prince of many Virtues, & many greate Imperfections, Debonaire, Easy of accesse, not bloudy or Cruel: his Countenance fierce, his voice greate, proper of person, every motion became him, a lover of the sea, & skillfull in shipping, not affecting other studys, yet he had a laboratory and knew of many Empyrical Medicines, & the easier Mechanical Mathematics: Loved Planting, building, & brought in a politer way of living, which passed to Luxurie & intollerable expense: He had a particular Talent in telling stories & facetious passages of which he had innumerable, which made some bouffoones and vitous wretches too presumptuous, & familiar, not worthy [of] the favors they abused … An excellent prince doubtlesse had he ben lesse addicted to Women … never had [a] King more glorious opportunities to have made himselfe, his people & all Europ happy, & prevented innumerable mischiefs, had not his too Easy nature resign’d him to be menag’d by crafty men, & some abandoned & prophane wretches, who corrupted his otherwise sufficient parts … those wiccked creatures tooke him [off] from all application becoming so greate a King.23
William and Dorothy had long hoped that their shy son John, once described by his mother as ‘the quietest best little boy that Ever was born’,24 would get on in life and marry. He was their last surviving child and not yet twenty-five, when in the spring of 1680 his father wrote from Sheen to his old friend Henry Sidney in The Hague, expressing his hopes that John – as well as his old friend – would embrace marriage, the state that had given him so much pleasure. William was just as keen as his father had been that his son and heir ally himself with someone with money and so secure the meagre Temple fortunes; and in Henry Sidney’s case, he was concerned by his friend’s rackety personal life and thought he should settle down:
Whenever you come over … I shall be pressing you to marry, because I think it will be the best for the rest of your life; and, having made some enquiries against my son’s coming over, I shall tell you of some [heiresses] I have heard of, who may be in your reach, though they may not be in his, while I live and spoil his fortunes; and I shall take the same pleasure in bringing about such an affair for you as for him, though that be all I have at this time at heart, and shall be mightily pleased to see you both in a way of passing long and easy lives together when I am gone, and as good friends as you and I have always been.25
In fact Henry Sidney belonged to the generation between William and his son, being thirty-nine years old at the time this letter was written to William’s fifty-two. Despite long public, and at times scandalous, affairs with various women he died unmarried. With all the charm and gaiety of a younger son, he was described by the cleric and historian Gilbert Burnet as ‘a graceful man, and one who had lived long in the Court, where he had some adventures that became very public. He was a man of a sweet and caressing temper, had no malice in his heart, but too great
a love of pleasure.’26
More satisfactorily for his family, John Temple, in whom so many parental hopes were vested, chose a bride himself in his thirtieth year. He had been in France for some time, working in a diplomatic capacity, and fell in love with Marie du Plessis, the daughter of a wealthy Huguenot family who came originally from Rambouillet, just south-west of Versailles. The Huguenots were suffering increasing harassment and discrimination in France and many of the better-off families sought to marry their daughters, with large dowries as encouragement, into English or Dutch families who could give them and their families some status, security and freedom from religious persecution. The English ambassador Henry Savile was struck by the quality of the young Huguenot women he met and the quantity of money their families were prepared to offer, mentioning that there was one particularly pretty girl whose dowry was £25,000. The young John Temple had some business dealings with the ambassador and it may well be that he was introduced by him to Marie du Plessis, who had a house in Paris.
Mademoiselle du Plessis was twenty-two years old at her marriage and described rather bleakly in a biographical publication of 1763 as ‘a young lady very eminent for her rare accomplishments of body and mind, and more since for her charity and piety’.27 The charity and piety were qualities perhaps more marked in her later years but nevertheless, despite the chilliness of this description, John was smitten by her and when they were apart slept with one of her letters under his pillow. There was some official objection to their marriage and on William’s request Charles II had offered to do what he could to influence matters through the good offices of Louis XIV himself, if necessary. John Temple and Marie du Plessis were eventually married in France on 7 September 1685* and John soon brought his pregnant bride to England to join his family at Sheen.