Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  For any weakness of the heart, saffron was the desired treatment, its spirit, William declared, ‘of all others, the noblest and most innocent, and yet of the greatest virtue’. He had seen a man left by the physicians as a desperate case and without hope who was restored to health by saffron, but, as with rue, he counselled against overdoing it. The ingestion of alehoof, or ground ivy, he attributed to his ten-year freedom from the dreaded kidney stone. William thought it was a kind of antidote to the damage stale beer did to the kidneys, once the hop was introduced to the country. Thanks to this plant, he claimed, our ancestors enjoyed greater longevity than any people in Europe.

  Garlic was the strong man of all the plants, ‘so that the labour of the world seems to be performed by the force and virtue of garlic, leeks, and onions’. Again it was a great strengthener of the stomach, improved appetite and the best kind of hangover cure: in France a garlic broth was known as ‘soupe é l’yvroigne [ivrogne, drunkard]’.48 Garlic was also thought to help ease the pain of gout but William found an unremitting diet of garlic hard to sustain and also worried about his breath becoming ‘offensive to the company I conversed with’.49

  The whole family suffered from digestive problems, for which the traditional cure was ‘powder of crabs-eyes and claws and burnt eggshells’. It was no surprise that William and Dorothy, with their love of fruit and the cornucopia home-grown on their doorstep, should turn to a much more agreeable cure: ‘I have never found any thing of much or certain effect,’ William wrote, ‘besides the eating of strawberries, common cherries, white figs, soft peaches, or grapes, before every meal, during their seasons; and when these are past, apples after meals; but all must be very ripe.’50

  He did not entirely eschew using animal parts in acceptable cures, extolling the value of powdered millipedes mixed with butter and made into little balls that were then left to melt at the root of the tongue. This was not only a failsafe treatment for sore throats but apparently breast cancer too. And the heroic old Prince Maurice of Nassau,* whose successful governorship of the Dutch colony of Brazil had introduced him to many exotic practices, suggested that the best treatment for a cold in the head, or in fact any weakness in the eyes, was to stick a rolled tobacco leaf up each nostril and keep it there for an hour each morning. This had saved the prince’s eyesight when he thought he was going blind at the age of thirty and William thought it had helped improve his own sight too.

  While William and Dorothy were happily engaged with the garden, their reading, writing and entertaining those good friends who managed to struggle to their secluded retreat, the political mood of the nation was darkening. James II had succeeded his brother in February 1685. Two uprisings against his succession, led by the Duke of Monmouth in the West Country and Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, in Scotland, had been easily routed and Monmouth and Argyll summarily executed. In his lack of understanding of his people and his uncompromising stance on religion, James quickly squandered the generosity of his people’s welcome. His obstinate insistence on reviving Catholicism in his dominion meant that within two years he was heading for confrontation with the Tory Anglicans who had supported him in the fight against the Exclusion Bill. Anxiety turned to alarm when his second wife, the Catholic Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son, James Edward Stuart, in June 1688. It was popularly believed that the birth of a Catholic son and heir was a crucial part of James’s mission to reconvert the islands permanently and there were many who thought the pregnancy was a sham and the baby had been smuggled into the queen’s room in a warming pan.

  One month later the ‘Immortal Seven’, a highly reputable group of peers, a bishop and politicians, among them Henry Sidney, William Temple’s old friend, and Danby, Dorothy’s cousin, invited William of Orange to invade the country. The prince had been closely watching the turn of events across the Channel but had needed this official invitation before he could act. Having been gathering troops during the previous months, he was quick to respond and by November had set sail with 20,000 men.

  It seemed extraordinary, but Martha insisted it was true, that her brother knew nothing of the earlier negotiations of this revolution. However, once the invasion was under way, it was talked of by everyone, and Dorothy and William’s son John, who had met the prince when they were in The Hague, was extremely keen to go and greet him when he arrived on English soil. William still had the kind of authority over John that his own father had exercised with him. He forbade his thirty-two-year-old son to attend the invading Prince of Orange: he had promised his loyalty to James II and felt his own honour would be at stake if he contradicted his principle ‘of never engageing in any thing yt appear’d illegall nor yt devided the Royal famely’.51 The moment James had fled of his own volition, however, William then felt able to meet William of Orange and formally introduce his son to him in his new guise. The prince apologised for keeping William in the dark: he explained he had sought to save William any conflict of loyalties, ‘[he]said twas in kindness to him [William], yt hee [had] not bin acquainted with his designes’.52

  Both William and Dorothy were affectionate parents; for the time they were tolerant and liberal in their ideas on family relationships. At the beginning of his memoirs, William wrote a letter to John in which much of his own nature, his love for his son and his philosophy of life were revealed. The tone was also rather remarkable for its modesty and the respect and equality with which he treated his son. This was written five years before the revolution of 1688, when he did in fact overrule John’s wishes, but it would seem from this, for the first time.

  TO MY SON

  I do not remember ever to have refused any thing you have desired of me; which I take to be a greater compliment to you than to myself, since for a young man to make none but reasonable desires, is yet more extraordinary than for an old man to think them so. That which you made me some time since, and have so often renewed, I have at last resolved to comply with, as well as the rest; and, if I live, will leave you some Memoirs of what has passed …

  Twenty years of my life I passed in public thoughts and business, from the thirty-second to the fifty-second year of my age; which I take to be the part of a man’s life fittest to be dedicated to the service of his Prince or State, the rest being usually too much taken up with his pleasures or his ease … All the rest of my age before and since that period, I have taken no more notice of what passed upon the public scene, than an old man uses to do of what is acted on a theatre, where he gets as easy a seat as he can, entertains himself with what passes upon the stage, not caring who the actors are, or what the plot, nor whether he goes out before the play be done …

  You know how lazy I am in my temper, how uneasy in my health, how weak in my eyes, and how much of my time passes in walking or riding, and thereby fencing all I can against two cruel diseases that have for some time pursued me …

  if you find any thing either instructing or diverting in what I shall write upon this subject, you may attribute it wholly to the kindness and esteem I have for you, without which I should not have given myself the trouble of such recollections; and as I intend them for your use, so I desire no other may be made of them during my life: when that is ended, neither they nor you will be any more in my care; and whatever I leave of this, or any other kind, will be in your disposal. I am the gladder, and it is but just, that my public employment should contribute something to your entertainment, since they have done so little to your fortune, upon which I can make you no excuses; it was a thing so often in my power, that it was never in my thoughts; which were turned always upon how much less I needed, rather than how much more. If yours have the same turn, you will be but too rich; if the contrary, you will be ever poor.53

  Although the invasion was expected nobody knew what resistance they would find. Certainly William of Orange’s forces in a convoy of about 200 sailing ships escorted by forty-nine warships made an impressive sight as they sailed towards the West Country, where the Monmouth rebellion and Judge Jeffreys’s Bloody
Assizes had left the local populace bitterly disaffected. The British fleet was outnumbered but also not really hostile: some officers had already been in communication with the Prince of Orange who was himself anxious to avoid any conflict that would immediately reawaken the historical enmity between the Dutch and English fleets. The Dutch fleet slipped by the British without a shot being fired and landed, unopposed, at Torbay in Devon, on 5 November. The weather and fortune had been so favourable to this risky plan that for generations men referred to the ‘Protestant wind’ that had made such a peaceful and orderly coup possible.

  William of Orange moved his disciplined forces up from the west, ensuring Plymouth, then on through Exeter and from there in stages to London. Dorothy and William felt Moor Park was too close to the prospective route of the invading army and that they might get caught between two opposing forces so moved with Martha back to Sheen to live under their son’s roof again. In fact, there was no real opposition for the prince to vanquish. Any kind of war would have rallied the English behind their king, but James instead recognised he had lost the support not only of his daughters Mary, William of Orange’s wife, and Anne too, but also most of the power brokers in parliament, the Church and the aristocracy. On 21 December James fled London in disguise. He was discovered by Kentish fishermen and brought back to London where a committee of his peers suggested to him that he leave voluntarily. This he did, sailing from Rochester for France and arriving in time for Christmas.

  At Sheen, William was visited by the prince two or three times to ask him to accept, under the new regime, the position of secretary of state. Then his friends trooped down, all urging him to join the new government. Martha wrote how, given his experience and reputation, his involvement would have bestowed a sense of legitimacy to the proceedings and calmed people’s fears. He was put under a great deal of pressure to add his steadiness and authority to the nervous situation: ‘nobody gave him any quiet, laying to his heart how the Prince that was his friend, his country, & Religion must suffer, that his refuseing to engage in it must give an ill opinion of all that was done, & make others mistrust some unknowne designes, that a man of truth & honnour could not enter into.’54

  William was adamant that he would not re-enter public life again, but it troubled him to let down so many people he esteemed. Perhaps if he had been younger and his health better he would have been full of zest to join his friends and the prince on this adventure, starting a new regime from scratch built on some of the more egalitarian principles he had so admired during his Dutch residency. He clung to his resolve to remain in retirement, ‘yet his heart was a great deal broken with the trouble & uneasiness the Prince & all his friends exprest at it’.55

  This did not stop his son John, however, accepting a post with the new government in early April 1689. Perhaps as a mark of gratitude and favour to William, his son was promoted beyond his abilities and experience when he was created secretary of war in the government of the newly crowned William III and Queen Mary II. Certainly William believed that just as he bowed out of public life it was right that his son should enter centre stage. Immediately, John was filled with anxiety at the enormity of his responsibilities and within a few days had tried to resign. William, however, ‘with the tenderness of a father’ had reassured him that he would soon gain confidence, and ‘if he was not yet capable of officiating himself, he might be in two or three months, and in the meantime his clerks would do the business’.56

  But John had always been shy and conscientious and lacked his father’s confidence and more robust character. Possibly he shared both parents’ propensity to bouts of melancholy or depression. Before the week was out, John had succumbed to his despair. He went down to the river at Whitehall and hired a boat, turning aside his usual boatman. He asked the stranger to row him to below the bridge and just as they shot between the pillars, where the water raced most strongly, the young man carefully placed a shilling and a piece of paper on his seat, bid the boatman farewell and threw himself into the surging tide. ‘Afterwards he ris up again, but the eddies sucked him in before the waterman could bring his boat about, and so he drowned.’

  The message John had left behind in the boat read: ‘My folly in undertaking what I was not able to perform has done the King and kingdom a great deal of prejudice. I wish him all happiness and abler servants than John Temple.’57

  The story was so tragic and inexplicable that there was much debate at the time as to what had caused his sudden suicidal despair. It seemed that there was one incident of misjudgement that had preyed on his mind. Earlier in the year John had vouched to William of Orange for the trustworthiness of General Hamilton, who was Catholic and detained in the Tower under suspicion of conspiracy. John had suggested Hamilton be released and allowed to go to Ireland to persuade the Earl of Tyrconnel,* who was Hamilton’s friend, to support the government rather than the recently deposed James II in France. In fact Hamilton did the opposite and encouraged Tyrconnel to withstand the new English government and hold out for the restoration of James. With this the Irish Jacobite war against the new king began, as James, supported by the French, arrived in March at Kinsale in Ireland to be met by a supportive Irish army raised by ‘the Great’ Tyrconnel. They marched on Dublin and encountered little resistance.*

  It is thought that John drowned himself on 19 April, a month after James had arrived in Ireland and temporarily gained control of much of the country, apart from Londonderry, which the Jacobites put under siege that day. Hamilton’s duplicity and the subsequent uprising were very serious at the time, but possibly could not have been foreseen. However, the effects of the rebellion came close to home, for Sir John Temple, William’s lawyer brother and the highly regarded solicitor-general in Dublin, was forced to leave Ireland, his estates and job under threat. In fact what became known as the ‘Patriot Parliament’ of Catholic gentry hastily convened on 7 May, with James presiding, sequestered the estates that had earlier been confiscated from Catholic landowners and redistributed to Protestants, and certainly Sir John’s estates were included, as were probably William’s too. The war was soon over and the status quo restored and indeed, the following year, Sir John was appointed attorney general, but his poor nephew John would not have known this at the time of the crisis and was mortified by the public and private repercussions of his misplaced trust in General Hamilton.

  For a quiet and modest young man like John Temple such a public misjudgement with such disastrous consequences must have been hard to reconcile with the ethos in which he had grown up at home: his mother’s high-mindedness and fear of public censure and the lofty value his father put on personal honour, probity and acceptance of responsibility. Whatever the complex reasons for John’s suicide, his parents were devastated. Their last surviving child, their only son, was dead. And it was the worst kind of death because it was by his own hand. Both William and Dorothy, brought up well-versed in Christian doctrine, believed that a suicide was an affront to God: ‘The greatest crime,’ William had written, ‘is for a man to kill himself.’58 Heartbroken, Dorothy inscribed on John’s last letter to her:

  Child’s paper he writ

  before he killed himself.

  The superscription was touching and tragic in her bleak honesty and lack of prevarication or euphemism, also in the sense that John, although long grown up and a married man, was still her child, that first and special son.

  On this six-inch square of paper in neat writing was John’s last letter to his family:

  ’Tis not out of any Dissatisfaction from my ffriends [family], from whom I have recd Infinitely more ffriendship and kindness than I deserve, I say it is not from any such reason that I do myself this violence, but having been long tired with the Burthen of this life, ’tis now become Insupportable. From my ffather and mother I have had escpecially of late all the marks of tenderness in the world, and no less from my dear Dear Brother and Sisters, to whom I wish and all my ffriends Health and Happiness and fogetfullness of me. I am not Consci
ous of my self or any Ill Action, I despair not of ease in a futurity, the only regret I leave the world with is, that I shall leave my ffriends [family] for sometime (I hope but for a little time) in Affliction.59

  Suicide was considered by the Church and state a shameful crime against God, punishable by being denied proper burial rights and a place in heaven. In practical terms too the body of the suicide was outcast, refused burial in hallowed ground, separated from loved ones even in death. For John’s parents, the shock and grief of his loss was painful enough, but the Christian threat of his soul’s eternal torment and separation from them in death must have been insupportable. Even Jeremy Taylor, that humane divine to whom they turned for spiritual direction and consolation, upheld the orthodox view that self-murder was as much a sin as causing the death of another.

  Interestingly, the family appears to have seen John’s inexplicable act as a symptom of some kind of illness. In writing of the utter unexpectedness of his suicide and the resultant shock to the family, Martha attempted to explain it as a sudden mental breakdown: ‘ye cruel blow yt happen’d in ye loss of his son wch was thought to proceed from an illness [John] had long complain’d of strikeing up to his head, nobody appearing happier in his famely, nor more sattisfied wth his fortunes’.60 This shocking death of their last surviving child seemed to break some fundamental spring of faith and optimism in Dorothy and William, and Martha continued bleakly: ‘with this deplorable accident ended all the good fortunes soe long taken notice of in our Famely, & but too well confirm’d the rule that no man ought to thinke his life happy till ye end of it.’61

  Dante’s Divina Commedia was not translated into English until the beginning of the next century so they were probably spared his affecting vision of the souls of suicides confined in the seventh circle of hell within the twisted branches of trees, to be torn at by the Harpies and bled with every broken twig. But modern psychiatry might more prosaically recognise a similar agony and isolation of a true endogenous depression. The fact John found his life a burden and that it had become increasingly insupportable is a classic symptom, as was his desire that his devoted family forget him, certain he was not worth their love and lasting concern. His mention of the tenderness he had received from his brother and sisters might have referred to his wife’s family, but if he was thinking of his own siblings, all long dead, with Diana whose death was the most recent having died exactly ten years before, this also revealed his confused emotions and the morbid pull of the past.