Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  Dorothy and William, together with Martha, shared their house for a year with the newly married John and Marie and their baby daughter Elizabeth, born in 1686. Dorothy had grown disenchanted with Sheen; it was close to London and they were continually entertaining, even more so now that her son and daughter-in-law were inviting their friends. It was also full of memories of Diana and grief was exhausting: as Martha noticed, Dorothy had grown ‘extreamly tir’d with the resort of so much company’.28 William too was increasingly plagued by the gout and the lively activities of his young family under his roof prodded him into a characteristically generous act: ‘He devided his little estate equally between his son & himselfe (& to his Wife in Joynter after) wch was never besides his place of Master of ye Rolles above fiveteen hundred pounds a year.’†29

  A neighbourly dispute that had turned nasty in the mid-1680s had also threatened William and Dorothy’s peace of mind and taken the shine off Sheen. Henry Brouncker* had become the 3rd viscount in 1684 and owned the adjoining property to the Temples’ house. By all accounts he was a thoroughly obnoxious man of whom no one could find a good word to say. As groom of the bedchamber to the Duke of York, before he became James II, Brouncker was known to be one of James’s pimps, reputed to favour young girl orange-sellers himself. According to Armand de Gramont,† ‘he kept … a little country house [possibly at Sheen] always well stocked with working-girls’.30 Samuel Pepys, who worked with Brouncker’s elder brother William and was not known for prudishness or sanctimony did not mince words in describing Henry: ‘he was a pestilential rogue. an Atheist, that would have sold his King and country for 6d almost – so covetous and wicked a rogue he is by all men’s report.’31 At the time of Brouncker’s dispute with William, even mild-mannered John Evelyn characterised him as ‘hard covetous vicious’, certainly not a man to fall out with.

  William and the unloved viscount had started out civilly enough. Brouncker’s property lay on the other side of a stone wall that enclosed Crown Court, an area in which a number of houses were built including William and Dorothy’s own, plus another two they had bought from Lord Leicester. All these houses within Crown Court shared a drive. But Brouncker initially asked William’s permission to break through their adjoining wall and put in a gate, so that he could visit him more easily without using the common drive. William, being naturally neighbourly, agreed to this. Unfortunately, while both men were at dinner with the Duke of Ormonde, William took exception to something Brouncker said.

  Martha had noted how her brother’s feelings were quickly roused: ‘With this warmth in his kindnesse hee was not sometimes without strong aversions, soe as to be uneasy at the sight of some, & impatient of their conversation. Apt to be warme in disputes & expostulations.’32 Certainly, Brouncker sounded like the kind of man who might make William incandescent in disputes and expostulation. In revenge for this disagreement, Henry Brouncker threatened to widen the pedestrian access into William’s property and make it a thoroughfare ‘for coaches and carrs and carriages and drays’. If William refused permission, he threatened he would build a house against the adjoining wall that protected William’s ‘Mansion House’ and ‘burn turfe therein and stinke him out of his house and garden’.33 In fact Brouncker did knock down part of the ancient wall and erect some large gates, an action of such outrageous provocation that William was forced to issue a writ against him, the outcome of which is unknown.

  There was an anecdotal story of these two neighbours locked in posturing one-upmanship when Lord Brouncker closed the dispute with: ‘Sir William, say no more of the matter; you must at length yield to me, I have lately got something which it is impossible for you to obtain, for my Welsh steward has sent me a flock of geese; and these are what you can never have, since all your geese are swans.’34 Almost certainly apocryphal, this story nevertheless expressed something of William’s natural optimism and enthusiastic embrace of people and ideas that often led to overestimation and chagrin: Brouncker, on the other hand, appeared to be more a man who would claim all other people’s swans were ducks.

  So leaving his house and the magnificent fruit gardens he had cultivated from scratch for the past twenty years, William and Dorothy, with the faithful Martha, prepared to move in November 1686 to a house much further from town that they had purchased the previous year.

  King James II was at Windsor that month and William had waited on him, as he always did. Martha noted in her memoir how the king ‘often turned the whole conversation to Sr WT, as soon as he came into the room’. This time William told James that he was about to move to a more distant seat ‘& beg’d his favour & protection to one that would alwayes live the best subject in the World, but never agin, (whatever happen’d) enter into any publick business & beg’d his Majesty would never give credit to any thing he might hear to the contrary’.35 This declaration of loyalty made it seem that William, so long a good friend to the Prince of Orange, had some prescience of the revolution to come. But Martha was adamant that William was ignorant of any politicking behind the scenes: ‘there is nothing surer, not only yt he was not acquainted with it, but was I am confident one of the last men in England yt beleev’d it’. Certainly the king never doubted William’s probity, stressing again that he ‘was to be alwayes beleev’d, asur’d him of all he disir’d, made him some reproaches for not entertaining him into his service, wch he said was his owne fault, & kept his word as faithfully to Sr W T dureing all that happen’d after, as Sr WT did to him’.36

  The house William and Dorothy had bought, for £2,000, was called at various times Compton Hall or Moor House, near Farnham in Surrey on the road to Waverley Abbey. Built at the foot of the steep, wooded Crooksbury Hill, it faced south-west over the River Wey to the distant hills that bordered the far side of the valley. They decided to rename it Moor Park after the romantic house and gardens in Hertfordshire that they had loved when they were young, the natural destination for a honeymoon when their courtship finally ended and their eventful life together began.

  This new Moor Park was a handsome manor house built in the early 1630s with fashionable curly Dutch gables. Above the front door William placed a shield bearing the Temple arms and beneath that a stone tablet inscribed with touching aptness, DEUS NOBIS HAEC OTIA FECIT [God made this peace for us]. The family treasures, their pictures by Van Dyck and Holbein and portraits of Dorothy and William by Sir Peter Lely and Gaspar Netscher, together with the charming painting of Martha with Diana made it feel like home. One of their Holbein portraits, of Sir John Rayne, bore an inscription that must have found an echo in William, looking back on his career:

  J’obais a qui je dois,

  Je sers a qui me plaist,

  Et suis a qui me merite.

  [I obey who I must,

  I serve whom I choose,

  And am his who deserves me.]

  There were cabinets for fine china and one specially made to protect Dorothy’s precious letters, so carefully saved by William over the years.

  The land on which the house was built sloped gently from its south-west aspect to the river, making it the perfect canvas for William’s garden design. Although his famous essay on gardening had been written at Sheen, it was here at Moor Park that he had the chance to realise his ideas in full. In describing the perfection of the original Moor Park, William had commended the broad terrace that ran the width of the garden side of the house, on to which the best rooms faced. Here at his new house he had a similarly broad parterre, overlooked by his main reception rooms, thus fulfilling his brief that the garden should be ‘like one of the rooms out of which you step into another’.37 Although he had long recognised that there was an exotic beauty in oriental garden design based on cleverly contrived irregularity and imitation of nature, he still favoured the geometry of the Dutch and English gardens he had grown up admiring so much.

  At his Moor Park William created promenades around the perimeter of the garden and intersecting paths across it: he favoured gravel as an all-weather surface
that would not ruin the shoes and skirts of the women of the household. A bowling green and a geometrically planted flower garden were constructed on the lower level beyond the terrace and a central avenue of trees led down to the canal, with its fountain. The eye was then led on to the river itself, canalised for the garden section of its course to make it work visually as a more formal extent of water. The canal was bordered by two rows of plane trees and its water topped up and refreshed from the river by an ingenious great wheel with attached buckets that scooped up river water, depositing it as it turned into a vessel attached to a pipe feeding the canal.

  As William admitted in his essay, to create a beautiful garden using the principles of sharawadgi was far more exacting than relying on the reliable structure of straight lines characteristic of the classic European gardens of the time. However the wooded hill that rose steeply at the front of his house provided a picturesque wildness, together with natural caves and contorted trees clinging to the cliff, to provide a frisson of contrast with the geometry of his house and formal garden beyond. He also boldly embarked on his own experiment in sublime irregularity by making a pod-shaped section to his garden, outside the boundary of his more formal design, where serpentine paths meandered through naturalistic planting of shrubs and woodland, punctuated by various romantic features to arrest the eye.

  While in The Hague William and Dorothy had made a close friendship with William of Orange’s secretary Constantijn Huygens and his wife. His poet father’s country house Hofwijk had a notable garden almost entirely created by avenues of trees, surely visited by William and Dorothy during their time at The Hague. He had written a poem evoking his garden and expressing the beginnings of the concept of ‘tamed wilderness’ that William in his own way experimented with in his own innovative creation at Moor Park:

  This the tame wilderness of wild civility;

  Or so I call the wood, as Reason I love well

  And love the balance of the Golden Mean, you see,

  To tame would be too formal here; too wild, too coarse,

  So that which lies between can satisfy us best

  In our desires for tame and wild, contrasting things38

  William, in his search for a kind of civilised wilderness, ‘for tame and wild, contrasting things’, could find inspiration and illustration in nature itself. There was one particular geological feature on his land that seemed to exert a romantic hold on his household and the friends who visited. Mother Ludwell’s Cave (or Mother Ludlam’s Hole) was within easy walking distance from the house, a natural and lofty sandstone hollow in Crooksbury Hill with a stream running over its floor. Before the dissolution of the monasteries, this spring was a likely water source for the important Cistercian monastery Waverley Abbey in the valley below. Soon after moving to Moor Park, William started to clean up the cave and pave the entrance, making it more like a grotto, an essential ingredient in the wilder reaches of a gentleman’s garden and an intriguing focus for walks along the side of the wooded hill.

  All kinds of legends were attached to the place: Mother Ludlum had been a wise witch, complete with cauldron, who had operated a kind of lending service of essentials to the impoverished neighbourhood; the cave was a magical place where fortunes could be foretold and fairy music heard. It had so captured the imagination of William and Dorothy’s household that two poems were written about it during their time at Moor Park. The better of the two has been thought to have been an early poem of Jonathan Swift’s, possibly written about 1693. It gave a romanticised impression of the setting of Moor Park and possibly in ‘Pomona’ refers to the fruit-growing William and in ‘Flora’ the presiding spirit of Dorothy.

  I that of Ludwell sing, to Ludwell run,

  Her self my muse, her spring my Helicon.

  the neighbouring park its friendly aid allows;

  Perfum’d with thyme, o’rspread with shady boughs;

  its leafie canopys new thoughts instill,

  And Crooksberry supplies the cloven hill.

  Pomona does Minerva’s stores dispence,

  And Flora sheds her balmie influence;

  All things conspire to press my modest Muse:

  The morning herbs adorn’d with pearly dews,

  the meadows interlaced with silver flouds,

  the frizzled thickets, and the taller woods.

  the whisp’ring Zephyrs my more silent tongue

  correct, and Philomena chirps a song.

  is there a bird of all the blooming year,

  that has not sung his early Mattins here?

  …

  an awfull Fabrick built by Nature’s hand

  does raise our wonder, our respect command

  three lucky trees to wilder art unknown

  seem on the front a growing triple crown.

  …

  Thus nature is preserv’d in every part,

  sometimes adorn’d, but nere debauch’d by art.39

  With such building projects to excite them, Martha wrote how happy they all were in this new house during the first year there, ‘he & the few friends [family] he had with him reckon’d amongst the best of their lives, [they] grew kind to ye place where the air is extream good & healthfull’.40 William saw the refurbishment or building of a house and garden as having a larger design than just the pleasure of the owner’s family. His stressing of the public service involved, perhaps revealed his sensitivity still to the charge that he had retired too early and neglected his duty to his country: ‘[gardening] and building being a sort of creation, that raise beautiful fabrics and figures out of nothing, that make the convenience and pleasure of all private habitations, that employ many hands, and circulate much money among the poorer sort and artisans, that are a public service to one’s country, by the example as well as effect, which adorn the scene, improve the earth, and even the air itself in some degree.’41

  It also suited them all to be so secluded. About forty miles from London, Moor Park was far enough away to deter casual visitors, the area ‘soe little inhabited that he seldome saw any company but such friends as were content often came twenty or thirty miles to it, & turned himselfe agin only to the cares of a country life, wch he had soe long before bin acquainted with’.42

  Unsurprisingly, William was truly content living with the two women who loved him best. More surprising is the fact that Dorothy and Martha seem to have coexisted for most of Dorothy’s married life with no real evidence of friction. If this was the case it would have been due more to Dorothy’s forbearance and wisdom, for Martha, lively and more extrovert than she, was involved also in the social and diplomatic life of the Temples and inevitably must have risked stepping on Dorothy’s toes at some point. However, Martha was younger by more than ten years and admired her clever sister-in-law considerably, describing her as ‘a very extraordinary woman, as well as a good wife, of whom nothing more need be said to her advantage, than that she was not only much esteemed by her friends and acquaintances, some of whom were persons of great figure, but valued and distinguished by such judges of merit as King William and Queen Mary, with whom she had the honour to keep a constant correspondences, being greatly admired for her fine style and delicate turn of wit and good sense in writing letters’.43 The implicit sense is that Dorothy’s intelligence and humour, her kind heart and nobility of spirit, all manifest in her youthful letters, remained clearly evident to everyone who knew her. Her greater age and intellect meant she was too elevated for Martha to feel they were in competition for William’s or the world’s affection.

  As the widowed Lady Giffard, Martha anyway had her own status and money and cultivated her own friends, although her brother and his family were always at the centre of her emotional interest and loyalty. Dorothy had already shown her tact and insight in her dealings with William’s family during their fraught courtship and had quickly charmed them all when she was eventually introduced to them as William’s wife. Through knowing her mind and quiet persistence she had always got her way and there was no rea
son to think that she was not still the powerful emotional centre of the family. William wrote in the latter part of his life: ‘The great happiness is to have a friend to observe and tell one of one’s faults, whom one has reason to esteem, and is apt to believe.’44 Given the way that the word ‘friend’ was used to mean spouse or close family member, perhaps it is not fanciful to suppose that in writing this he was thinking of Dorothy, the one woman whose intellectual capacity he held in greatest esteem.

  William had always been more sceptical about doctors and their cures than his contemporaries and in their youth had warned Dorothy against the steel infusions that she felt obliged to drink to cure her afflictions of the spleen and melancholy. He had seen too often how aggressive cures came close to killing the patient and much preferred trusting to the body’s own healing processes, aided by ‘various compositions of innocent ingredients, which feed the hopes of the patient, and the apothecary’s gains, but leave nature to her course, who is the sovereign physician in most cases’.45 In furtherance of this belief, from the time he had his own garden William grew herbs for the express purpose of treating his and his family’s ailments.

  In his essay ‘Of Health and long Life’, he itemised the herbs he particularly favoured medicinally. Sage was one of the best, he claimed, of great use for consumptive coughs when a handful of sage leaves should be boiled in spring water and the resultant infusion drunk every morning for a month. When he was in Holland vast quantities of sage were shipped off to the East Indies in return for the imported Indian tea. He found the herb rue excellent for all stomach upsets: it ‘dispels wind, helps perspiration, drives out ill humours, and thereby comes to be so much prescribed, and so commonly used in pestilential airs, and upon apprehensions of any contagion’,46 hence the prevalence of its use during the plague years when bunches of rue were held to the nose in an attempt to ward off the disease. A lump of myrrh, held in the mouth, was also a well-known protection from the plague, he wrote, one he had used himself; he advised, however, more urgent action: ‘the best and safest is to run away as soon as one can’.47