by Jane Dunn
… such ghastly fear
Late I beheld on every face appear;
Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great,
Trembling beheld the doubtful hand of fate;
Mild Dorothea, whom we both have long
Not dared to injure with our lowly song;
Sprung from a better world, and chosen then
The best companion for the best of men:
Martha too was prostrated with anxiety. Disguising her as Dorinda, Swift described the tearful suffering of a woman, now in her mid-fifties, who all her life had focused her passion on her eldest brother and now faced the possibility of his loss:
You that would grief describe, come here and trace
Its watery footsteps in Dorinda’s face:
Grief from Dorinda’s face does ne’er depart
Farther than its own palace in her heart.
William did recover from this acute illness and although never free from pain or really well again, made valiant efforts to continue with his gentlemanly existence, reading, writing still and enjoying the continual process of regeneration and growth in his beloved garden. There is a remarkable view of William as an old man with Dorothy, still maintaining their life together, recorded by a stranger with such clarity that a shaft of light shines through more than three centuries and falls on them in the garden at Moor Park, probably in the summer of 1694:
I found myself by chance in the neighbourhood of this famous diplomatist and philospher [a young Swiss tourist called Béat de Muralt* wrote to his friend back home]. I went to his house, and received every sort of courtesy; but from this, I think, no conclusions at all can be drawn in regard to the nation in general. In England, as elsewhere, there are few Sir William Temples; and men of his type prove nothing for their country, since they have all the good qualities of the nations they have known … It was in his house that I saw the ideal of a pleasant retreat; far enough from the town to be protected from visits, the air wholesome, the soil good, the view limited but pretty, a little stream which runs near making the only sound to be heard; the house small, convenient, and appropriately furnished; the garden in proportion to the house, and cultivated by the master himself. He is free from business, and to all appearances free from ambition; he has few servants, and some sensible people for company, one of the greatest pleasures of the country for anyone lucky enough to have it. I saw also the result of all this: I saw Monsieur Temple healthy and gay; and though he is gouty and getting on in years, he tired me in walking, and except for the rain which interrupted us would, I believe, have forced me to ask for quarter … This good old man thought I should not be sufficiently repaid for my trouble [in travelling so far to see him] if I saw only his little house; and though I assured him that I was more interested in men than in buildings, and that I was content with the honour of having seen him, he insisted that before returning to London I should go to Petwarch [Petworth], the country house of the Duke of Somerset. He gave me horses and servants to take me there, and fearing that the Duke might be gone to London, he asked my Lady Temple to write to the Duchess.
… In this magnificent palace [Petworth] the quiet house and the little garden of Monsieur Temple constantly recurred to my memory, and made me dream of the delights of a calm and secluded life.75
Dorothy had derived some real consolation from her friendship with Queen Mary, a friendship probably dating from the time Dorothy had been sent to vet her as a suitable marriage partner for the Prince of Orange when she was a girl of fifteen. Dorothy’s nieces, the daughters of William’s younger brother Sir John Temple, were also valued by the young queen as ladies-in-waiting. Queen Mary was the same generation as Dorothy’s daughter Diana, in fact was born only three years earlier, and was naturally affectionate, devoted and pious: it would be understandable that this motherless young woman derived a great deal of encouragement from Dorothy’s wise insights into the world, just as Dorothy found in her, particularly after the trauma of Diana’s death, an illustrious daughter figure to whom she could offer much needed affection and care.
They had had a long epistolary relationship although none of their letters survives, Dorothy’s probably burned along with Mary’s other papers before she died. Given their interaction it is interesting to note that the younger woman comforted herself over her childlessness with the same argument Dorothy had employed in trying to make sense of the shattering death of John that had rendered her childless too. Dorothy had written that, in taking her son from her, God was making it easier to face her own death, ‘that so having no tie to the world I may the better prepare myself to leave it’.76 Mary had expressed a very similar rationale in her journal a couple of years after John’s death when she must have witnessed at close hand the suffering of her old friend and perhaps have absorbed Dorothy’s own reasoned attempts at consolation: ‘I regard the lack of children as a mark that the Lord wills that I be more detached from this world and readier when it pleases Him to call me to himself.’77
Queen Mary had spent much of her young life expecting death. When smallpox struck her at the age of only thirty-two the king, usually so reserved and unemotional, was overwhelmed with grief. It was not only her husband who was inconsolable. Apparently Dorothy too was deeply affected. She had survived the anxiety of her own husband’s brush with death, but the toll on the nervous system and the accumulation of loss went deeper. Perhaps she could not absorb any more suffering and this illness and death was just one heartbreak too many. Having another young woman to whom she was close die of smallpox was to return to the nightmare of Diana’s death. It was noted by her family how the manner of Mary’s decline had affected Dorothy: ‘the deep affliction for her Majesty’s deplorable death … hastened her own’.78
Queen Mary died in the early morning of 28 December 1694. In early February, barely more than a month later, Dorothy herself was dead. There was no mention of any illness or warning. She was sixty-seven, a good age for the time, but it was generally thought the weight of memory and accumulated grief had taken its final toll.
She had loved William for forty-six years and had told him when they first met that the story she liked best from Ovid’s Metamorphoses was that of Philemon and Baucis. The legend of the devoted couple who begged the gods to let them die together brought tears to her eyes when she first read it. Jonathan Swift, more than a decade after her death, wrote his satirical poetic version of the story, placing the couple domestically in the English countryside in Kent, and a favourite poet of Dorothy’s, Abraham Cowley, offered his own emotional response. He immortalised the kind of equality between lovers that Dorothy had been so keen to ensure with marriage to William:
They mingled fates, and both in each did share,
They both were servants, and they both princes were.79
The signs were that she had attained this rare thing. But so great was her fear of losing those she loved that she had written to William during their courtship forbidding him to die before her. She had no pact with the gods now but, by dying first, at least evaded that final grief.
William, however, could not be spared such suffering. In their passionate youth he had written for her: ‘wee have beene so much one in our lives that twill not bee hansome to bee two in our deaths; no. let us indeavour our defence as long as wee can … let us dye both in an instant, that so our soules may goe together wheresoever they are destind, I am sure ther can bee no heaven without thee.’80
Although he could not yet join Dorothy perhaps William’s faith consoled him with the belief that she and Diana, and their seven babies, and even poor John, might be reunited at last and waiting for him. ‘Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise and great’ was buried on 7 February 1695 beside Diana in Westminster Abbey. John’s suicide meant that the Church denied him the prospect of reunion after death with those who loved him best. The great preacher and poet John Donne did not support such a proscriptive view, and William too perhaps had come to see suicide as a tragedy and not a crime. We cannot know if John’s
mother resisted her faith’s judgement on this matter, and embraced her son in death.
When she died Dorothy had not the slightest inkling that her character, wit and philosophical turn of mind would survive beyond the memory of those closest to her. In fact she would gain the best kind of immortality through her youthful letters, written for William’s eyes alone, but passed between members of her family down the generations, read, loved, admired and put away again, to be published eventually to great acclaim that echoed into the next centuries.
If she had known this her feelings would have been powerfully mixed. Dorothy was a woman of her time in desiring privacy from public gaze. This reticence was even more marked in her, naturally reflective and serious-minded and horrified by any exposure to the world. No doubt it would have dismayed her to have her amusement at the amorous adventures of the celebrities of her time, many of whom she knew personally, made public. However, she also had a proper pride in her intelligence, and great pleasure and wit in her intellectual discussions of politics or philosophy, and might perhaps have been gratified to have her many qualities more widely recognised and admired. Letter-writing of the quality and range of hers was a creative form, presenting herself and recreating her world for the one person who mattered most to her. It was also purely expressive of her views on everything, her pungent sense of humour, the unselfconscious joy of writing and her energetic engagement in the most important conversation of her life. ‘Love is a Terrible word, and I should blush to death if anything but a letter accused me on’t,’81 she had once written to William, and her letters are full of their love and the drama and fear of where such dangerous emotion leads.
William had always valued Dorothy’s letters, had begged her during their courtship to make them even longer, more passionate, and had complained of their meagreness after their marriage. But most crucially, he had preserved her love letters against all odds, despite their mutual agreement to destroy them after reading, so afraid were they of their love affair being discovered by their suspicious families. Jonathan Swift was not at Moor Park when Dorothy died but in memorialising her grief during her husband’s illness the previous year he had celebrated too her admirable qualities, with the suggestion that like a beautiful building she should endure, a paragon of female virtue to inspire succeeding centuries:
As some fair pile, yet spared by zeal and rage,
Lives pious witness of a better age;
So men may see what once was womankind,
In the fair shrine of Dorothea’s mind.82
In fact she was perceived as a long-abandoned ideal of intellectual womanhood by the daughter of the great Admiral George Byng* who, as an old woman, wrote in 1770 to her son, Dorothy’s great-nephew George Osborn, at Chicksands Priory. As the daughter of a dynamic self-made man, it was obvious how much she deplored the erosion of women’s education during the Hanoverian reigns through which she had lived: ‘I have I am sure often talked of [Lady Temple] but you did not mind it [take notice]. There were many memorable things recorded of her which I was acquainted with from Sir John Osborn and my aunt Digges, but in these days she might be reconed a buisy officious woman when ladies are bred to know nothing but nonsense.’83 The busyness and officiousness that she felt would have earned criticism from her more modern contemporaries, referred to the part Dorothy played in her husband’s diplomatic career as someone whose advice was sought and valued, and whom the Dutch had rated highly enough to nurture the rumour that it was Dorothy who wrote the ambassador’s letters.
Admiral Byng’s daughter was lent Dorothy’s letters by Dorothy’s granddaughter Elizabeth, Lady Temple, who had married her cousin John Temple and returned to live at Moor Park after William’s death. She had said she would burn the letters after they were read and somewhat surprisingly, this old lady who had read them with admiration agreed: ‘Most of those letters were in the tender stile with sensible [acutely felt] sentiments … such letters can never be exposed to advantage.’84 Some may have been burned at this point but many survived, so the conscientious granddaughter perhaps thought better of her threat.
William left no written expression of his grief at Dorothy’s death. But in the list of thoughts and ideas he had jotted down towards the end of his life he showed how inadequate he thought words were in explaining the deepest feelings of all: ‘Our thoughts are expressed by speech, our passions and motions as well without it.’85 In his famous letter on grief he had rehearsed many of Jeremy Taylor’s teachings, the central thought being: ‘Take no grief to heart; for there is no turning again: thou shalt not do him [who has died] good, but hurt thyself … For if the dead did die in the Lord, then there is joy to him; and it is an ill expression of our affection and our charity to weep uncomfortably at a change that hath carried my friend to the state of huge felicity.’86
Perhaps by this point in his life and after so much tragedy, the once ardent, impetuous youth had managed in old age to control his unruly feelings and take the measured view. He still had his beautiful gardens, his fruit trees, the consolations of nature where birdsong greeted each day and life went on. And he still had his devoted Martha, a sister who looked so like him, perhaps temperamentally mirrored him too, and had always offered him all her love and admiration. In a letter to her soon after Dorothy’s death, asking her to organise the selling of a ring to benefit his granddaughter Elizabeth, he thanked her for her faithful heart with this:
I say this to you, with a perfect confidence that you will never fail of doing me all the good offices I do or can deserve of you, either during my life or after my death, considering the true friendship that has so long continued between us without interruption, and, perhaps, without example, and which I am sure will do so to the last of our lives, as I dare answer for you, as well as for my dearest sister’s most affectionate brother,
WILLIAM TEMPLE87
Inevitably lonelier and plagued with gout, William attempted to continue with as active a life as he could, unwilling to give in to the limitations of age and the shadows of the grave. Something he wrote at this time showed his old charm and still jaunty courage: ‘When I consider how many noble and esteemable men, how many lovely and agreeable women, I have outlived among my acquaintance and friends, methinks it looks impertinent to be still alive.’88
Jonathan Swift left Moor Park in May 1694 in order to pursue his intention to be ordained a priest. There was possibly some ill-feeling at their parting: Swift was touchy and intense and perhaps felt hard done by and William was old and unhappy with change. Certainly he would be sorry to lose such an effective secretary, an intellectual young man full of ideas and, although temperamental, willing to work on copying his writings to prepare them for publication as well as read to him, listen to his stories of past glories and discuss the world. William’s household was now much diminished.
Swift had spent a frustrating summer in Dublin and found that he could not proceed with his ordination without a letter from William as to his good character and ‘Conduct in your Family’. The young man had continued to put off writing to request this due to a real or imagined rift between himself and his former employer: ‘The Sense I am in, how low I am fallen in Your Honor’s Thoughts, has denyed Me Assurance enough to beg this Favor till I find it impossible to avoyd.’ In fact he left the plea for this necessary certificate to the very last moment so that if William had not responded immediately it would have been too late for Swift to satisfy the requirements for ordination that year. To his credit, William did respond within days. Perhaps he was unaware of any rift, or perhaps just magnanimous to an emotionally overwrought young man. He obviously commended Swift in all the salient areas relating, as the young man requested, ‘To Morals and Learning, and the Reasons of quitting your Honor’s Family, that is, whether the last was occasion’d by any ill Actions of mine’,89 for Jonathan Swift was ordained on 28 October 1694.
William published An Introduction to the History of England in 1695, a largely derivative and idiosyncratic romp through m
yth, fact and anecdote. It was personal, easy to read, full of elegant digressions and odd omissions. In it he dwelled at particular length on the virtues of William the Conqueror’s reign and therefore it was thought at the time to have been written to help reconcile the British people to that more recently usurping foreigner, the third William, now their king. With the death of Queen Mary, it might have seemed that the king’s position would have become more precarious and in need of bolstering, but in fact the people warmed to him in their shared grief.
By 1696 William had asked Jonathan Swift to return to Moor Park, perhaps having heard how unsatisfied the young clergyman was with his living at the isolated and impoverished parish of Kilroot in County Antrim. Swift returned to the post of secretary once more, but the attraction of Moor Park this time may have been less to do with the work and Sir William and more the presence of Esther Johnson, the young daughter of the housekeeper, who became his ‘Stella’, the most important woman in his life. Rebecca Dingley, a poor relation of the Temples who lived there as a kind of companion to Martha, was also particularly sympathetic to the wild young man who brought some excitement to their rural seclusion.
Esther was only eight when Jonathan Swift first entered the household and he helped her with her reading and writing. She was a delightful if rather fragile child who seemed to be a favourite of all the family. Certainly William left her a legacy in his will. In the decade that Swift spent shuttling between Moor Park and Ireland she grew into a charming black-haired young woman of beauty and grace who loved him, and was immortalised in return in his Journal to Stella.
William also began to write in his last years a response to the criticism attracted by his essay published in Miscellanea II, ‘Upon the Ancient and Modern Learning’. This philosophical and discursive piece was itself a riposte to the essay of a young French intellectual Fontenelle* who had thrown his hat into the ring on the side of the ‘moderns’ in the ongoing controversy that raged particularly fiercely in France. In his essay ‘Digression sur les anciens et les modernes’, published in 1688, Fontenelle made an eloquent case that largely centred on the idea that the moderns benefited from an accumulation of knowledge and thus mounted, on the shoulders of the ancients, they could inevitably see further. William took the stance that the moderns were more like pygmies perched on the shoulders of giants and weighed into the fray in support of the great ancients who were, he felt, being unfairly cut down to size. He proposed a cyclical theory of cultural shifts, rather than a linear one where every generation necessarily improved intellectually on the last, but he made one slip that caused his critics to heap scorn on his argument. William praised the Epistles of Phalaris* as if they were authentic letters revealing the highest literary merit, sadly unaware that the greatest Greek scholar of the time, Richard Bentley, was in the process of proving them forgeries.