by Jane Dunn
Significant too were the family characteristics inherited from his parents and the pressure of their aspirations. There was William’s own self-professed temperamental unfitness for public office, prone as he was to take everything too much to heart. Despite his confidence and physical energy, his was an emotional nature that even his friends considered made him suffer more keenly the inevitable frustrations and humiliations of office. Both John’s parents were obsessive in their concern to maintain their reputations, Dorothy’s for intelligence and virtue, William’s for honour and integrity. These sensitivities and emotional attachments may have come together and been doubly reinforced in their son. Given this sensibility, his parents’ high expectations of absolute probity in everything would have been hard to live up to, his father’s virtuous mantle crushingly heavy to bear: perhaps nature and nurture combined with tragic result.
William and Dorothy could not leave their French daughter-in-law alone with their two young granddaughters in the house at Sheen and so stayed on for a few months more, much as they longed to return home to Moor Park. Jeremy Taylor showed a psychologically sensitive understanding of the effects of unexpected death on those left behind in a passage in Holy Dying contemplating a man drowned at sea whose family’s life was wrecked with his:
that peradventure this man’s wife in some part of the continent, safe and warm, looks next month for the good man’s return; or, it may be, his son knows nothing of the tempest; or his father thinks of that affectionate kiss, which still is warm upon the good old man’s cheek, ever since he took a kind farewell; and he weeps with joy to think how blessed he shall be when his beloved boy returns into the circle of his father’s arms. These are the thoughts of mortals, this is the end and sum of all their designs: a dark night and an ill guide, a boisterous sea and a broken cable, a hard rock and a rough wind, dashed in pieces the fortune of a whole family, and they that weep loudest for the accident are not yet entered into the storm, and yet have suffered shipwreck.62
Dorothy’s last surviving letter was written a few weeks later from Sheen to her nephew John Temple.* He was the young son of William’s brother, Sir John Temple, whose estates and position in Ireland were lost, albeit temporarily, as a result of the Jacobite war there. Her letter in reply to his condolences on her son’s death was full of suppressed pain and the weight of the struggle to maintain her rationality and Christian resignation in the face of overwhelming tragedy and grief:
Sheen, May 6th, 1689
Dear Nephew, – I give you many thanks for your kind letter and the sense you have of my affliction, which truly is very great. But since it is laid upon me by the hand of an Almighty and Gracious God, that always proportions His punishments to the support He gives with them, I may hope to bear it as a Christian ought to do, and more especially one that is conscious to herself of having many ways deserved it. The strange revolution we have seen might well have taught me what this world is, yet it seems it was necessary that I should have a near example of the uncertainty of all human blessings, that so having no tie to the world I may the better prepare myself to leave it; and that this correction may suffice to teach me my duty must be the prayer of your affectionate aunt and humble servant, D. Temple63
Although less devout than Dorothy, William had expressed the orthodox Christian teachings on suicide in his letter written some fifteen years before to the Countess of Essex on her grief for a dead daughter and quoted earlier. This rather cerebral essay had been his attempt to shake her out of a morbid depression, yet William seemed to write the following passage with the force of his own belief: ‘your life is not your own, but His that lent it you to manage, and preserve the best you could, and not throw it away, as if it came from some common hand. It belongs in a great measure to your country, and your family; and therefore, by all human laws, as well as divine, self-murder has ever been agreed upon as the greatest crime, and is punished here with the utmost shame, which is all that can be inflicted upon the dead.’
William had a great sense of the responsibilities each has to the other, particularly to closest family, and as he had written to the countess in those terms it was possible to see how much now he felt the loss of his only surviving child, and the terrible and widespread effects John’s death had on his own parents, wife and children:
Next to the mischiefs we do ourselves [in committing suicide], are those we do our children and our friends [family], as those who deserve best of us, or at least deserve no ill … Are there so many left of your own great family, that you should desire in a manner wholly to reduce it, by suffering the greatest and almost last branch of it to wither away before its time.64
All these losses were true of those William and Dorothy faced with the death of their son: the destruction of their own family line, and the sense that their granddaughters, now fatherless, were robbed of their best chances of a happy and secure childhood. Soon Sheen and its associations with the ghosts of John and Diana were too much to bear and as Martha explained at the end of her short biography of her brother, ‘With this load of his affliction, & my owne, & all of us with our hearts broken, we returned at ye end of yt year with him and his desolate Famely to More Park.’65
Dorothy and William were old now at sixty-two and sixty-one respectively. All the hope for the future and the survival of the family line that children bring had faded with the death of John. He had left two daughters, it was true, and for a while they and their mother accompanied the grieving Dorothy and William to Moor Park. Eventually William was to settle their London house on Marie and her children and it is possible that they soon made that their main residence. With no one now to carry on his name, William turned to sorting out his papers with an eye to securing for himself his reputation in the eyes of posterity. It was partially with this in mind together with his need, as his eyesight failed, to have someone read to him that William employed a young man as secretary.
Some time in 1689 Jonathan Swift joined the Temple household for a few months at Sheen before moving back with them to the magical isolation of Moor Park. He was not yet twenty-two and his position as secretary put him in status and salary above the steward and the other twenty or so servants, but not exactly on a par with the family. He had been born in Dublin to English parents, his father dead and unknown to him and his mother largely absent during his childhood and youth. He considered his own life to have been blighted by the disadvantages of his birth. It created an emotional backdrop of resentment and alienation to Swift’s brilliant but disturbing spirit. His academic career at Trinity College, Dublin, had been tempestuous and while he was about to take his MA degree in 1689 politics disrupted it further when the exiled James II invaded and threatened to overrun Ireland.
Jonathan Swift left Ireland, along with other Protestant students who feared for their prospects under a Jacobite regime, and turned up on his mother’s doorstep in Leicestershire. The Swift family had crossed paths on numerous occasions in the past with William and his father in Dublin and it was understandable that his mother suggested he look for employment with the illustrious Sir William Temple in his retirement. William accepted his responsibilities to a family in distress: ‘[Swift] has good friends though they have for the present lost their fortunes in Ireland, and his whole family having been long known to mee obliged mee thus farr to take care of Him,’66 he wrote to a friend.
This diffident but uncouth young man with the pale face and brilliant blue eyes gave no indication to Dorothy or William of the satiric genius that would bring him a lasting fame that would outstrip William’s own, and that of most of those they knew. As it was, he entered their household eager to please, yet hypersensitive, quick to take offence and primed for misunderstanding and disappointment. There had been little outlet for Swift’s genius at the time he met the Temples. It had burned largely unseen and caused trouble all his young life, but one man at least had recognised in his intensity the potential for either exceptional creative power or destruction. Swift had obviously accepted t
he truth of what had been said to him and repeated it to a friend: ‘a person of great Honour in Ireland* who was pleas’d to stoop so low as to look into my mind us’d to tell me, that my mind was like a conjur’d spirit, that would doe mischief, if I would not give it employment.’ A ‘conjured spirit’ is one invoked by supernatural power, implying something either devilish or sublime. Swift acknowledged that in idleness his thoughts spiralled into fantasy where ‘I have writt, & burnt and writt again upon almost all manner of subjects, more perhaps than any man in England’.67 This was written two years into his relationship with the Temples when he was beginning to focus his ambitions.
Swift moved into this elderly, grieving household to work for a once great man now set in his ways, and sometimes irascible with the pain of gout and the disappointments of his hopes. William’s sister had noted how John’s death had permanently affected the family and to William particularly it ‘brought a cloud upon ye remainder of his life & a damp upon ye good humour so natural to him & so often observ’d yt nothing could ever recover’.68 The young man set to work, reading to William, sorting and copying his letters, helping prepare his memoirs for publication and observing the manners and social interplay of a cultured domestic life.
Swift scholars have long discussed what kind of relationship existed between secretary and master. Every shade between two extremes has been suggested: either Swift was treated like a son and in return worshipped the great man, absorbing his literary and ideological lessons on the way, or the budding genius was treated as no better than a servant and seethed with malicious contempt for the mean, miserable and vain old man his poverty made him humour. In fact, recognising the great differences in age, upbringing and situation between them, their relationship was inevitably much more complex, but certainly mutually beneficial: given Swift’s fervent, insecure and touchy nature and William’s grief, failing health and care of his legacy, it surely incorporated elements of both extremes.
Jonathan Swift was young enough to be Dorothy and William’s grandson: they were approaching the end of their lives while he, at the start of his, was just finding his footing, uncertain where his enormous energies should be best expressed. Very early on he wrote an ode to William that was embarrassing in its flattery but expressed all kinds of truths, not least the fact that Swift was grateful for William’s patronage, approved of his principles generally and felt he needed to ingratiate himself with an important and well-connected patron. Just a section from two of the twelve stanzas gives a flavour of the message:
Those mighty epithets, learned, good, and great
Which we ne’er join’d before, but in romances meet,
We find in you at last united grown.
You cannot be compared to one:
I must like, like him that painted Venus’ face,
Borrow from ever one a grace;
Virgil and Epicurus will not do,
Their courting a retreat like you,
Unless I put in Caesar’s learning too:
Your happy frame at once controls
This great triumvirate of souls.
…
Shall I believe a spirit so divine
Was cast in the same mould with mine?
Why then does Nature so unjustly share
Among her elder sons the whole estate,
And all her jewels and her plate?
Poor we! cadets of Heaven, not worth her care,
Take up at best with lumber and the leavings of a fare69
And there were real signs of loyalty in his preface to William’s second volume of memoirs, published posthumously, where he eloquently defended him against charges directed at the first published volume that he wrote too much about himself (Swift asked: what else can a memoir be but a narrative of one’s own life?) and used too many French words or phrases (Swift pointed out that this was only to be expected since they were memoirs of William’s diplomacy when French was the usual tongue and it was a language in which he was fluent).
After William’s death, Swift’s sister Jane wrote to their cousin Deane Swift: ‘My poor brother has lost his best friend Sir William Temple, who was so fond of him whilst he lived.’70 And Swift himself, writing to Thomas Swift, another cousin with whom he was close at the time, explained how his affection for someone blunted his critical faculty: ‘I am just so to all my acquaintance I mean in proportion to my love of them, and Particularly to Sr Wm T. I never read his writings but I prefer him to all others at present in England.’71
But there are as many occasions when Swift was disenchanted with his employer: he wrote of how personally he took it when William was downcast or moody; he was irritated by his slowness in promoting him to his influential friends in the hopes of a better position; he would use his sharp wit at the old man’s expense in poking fun at his vanity and his concern for his reputation. ‘What a splutter,’ he was to write in recollection years later, ‘Sir William Temple [made] about being secretary of state.’72 It would have been unnatural if this brilliant, bitter, thin-skinned and increasingly ambitious young man had not lost patience at times with William and the stories of his glittering past. The present realities of an elderly and sadly diminished family, living in the reclusive depths of the English countryside, added to a young man’s impatience.
Swift’s own health declined. He blamed the onset of periodic dizziness and nausea, now suspected to have been Ménière’s disease,* on having over-indulged in William’s celebrated Golden Pippin apples at Sheen, having eaten a hundred straight off. His deafness began later at Moor Park, another distressing symptom of the same malady although not recognised as such by Swift or his physicians. The doctors he consulted had nothing to suggest other than that Irish air might restore him and so, with a letter of recommendation from William to Sir Robert Southwell, about to become secretary of state for Ireland, Swift returned to Dublin in the early summer of 1690. His health did not improve and he was back at Moor Park by the Christmas of 1691.
William, though increasingly plagued with gout, was still writing. He had enjoyed much success with the two books he had published before he retired, Observations on the United Provinces in 1673 and Miscellanea in 1679, in which he included his long disquisition on the cure of the gout by moxa. It made sense for him to continue with his publishing plans in his retirement and indeed his recently published Miscellanea Part II, which included his essays on gardens, heroic virtue, the merits of ancient learning over the modern, and on poetry, brought him much acclaim and some controversy. His Memoirs Part II published in 1691, initially without his name, also went to a number of reprints in his lifetime. Referred to as Part II, these were in fact the first to be published, William having destroyed Part I, probably as he had cast Arlington in heroic mould, with a wide-eyed innocence he had lived to regret. Swift as his new secretary had made copies for the printer of both these last works in his clear hand and William was delighted to welcome such a useful assistant back into the household again.
Gratifyingly, his opinion was still occasionally sought by the monarch and in the spring of 1693 King William, undecided as to whether to consent to a bill to institute triennial parliaments in an attempt to diminish the king’s control further and increase that of parliament, looked to William for advice. He sent his favourite William Bentinck, now Earl of Portland, down to Moor Park to see him. William argued forcefully in favour of the bill but, fearing he had not convinced Bentinck, sent his young secretary with a written list of his reasons to the king. The attempt failed and the king rejected the bill, but the whole episode showed that William trusted Swift with an important mission, much as he had his own son. He also recognised Swift’s intellectual ability, for the young man, when he was given an audience with the king, expatiated on William’s advice in his own words, bringing some new arguments to the discussion.
Dorothy had to face another family crisis at the end of that year when William himself fell dangerously ill. Having had all her children die before her, the fact that at least
two of the deaths were so painfully unexpected had reinforced her melancholic sense of the evanescence of happiness and the fleeting nature of life itself. Now she was forced to confront the loss of a beloved husband with whom she had lived for forty years, in which time they had survived so many reversals of fortune together. She had written to him when they were young about how happiness could not be relied on and how often one tragedy was quickly followed by another: ‘How true it is that a misfortune never com’s single; wee live in Expectation of some one happinesse that wee propose to our selv’s, an Age almost, and perhaps misse it at the last; but sad accidents have wings to overtake us, & come in fflocks like ill boading Raven’s.’73 She had also told him that she hoped he would outlive her and ‘I should not have thought you at all kinde, if you had done otherwise’.74 Now they were old, she had even less reason to want to outlive the man who had been the one emotional constant in her life since their first meeting, when he had found her an irresistible, spirited but melancholy girl. He had been her dashing hero then, and to contemplate his death after all these years together was almost too much to bear.
It is through one of Swift’s early odes, Occasioned by Sir William Temple’s Late Illness and Recovery, written in December, 1693, that we get our last glimpse of Dorothy, gentle, wise and good, contemplating with anguish the loss of her husband: