Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  The lasting fruits of this inflated controversy were two satiric masterpieces, A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books (A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought last Friday, Between the Antient and the Modern Books in St James’s Library), written by Jonathan Swift but not published until 1704. William had lost his appetite for battles as gout and old age wore him down and he never bothered to finish his own answer to his critics. However, his secretary’s more combative spirit was caught up in it all while he was under his roof and the resultant exuberant satire marshalled the forces of ancients, including Homer, Aristotle and Plato, making William general of the allies, against modernists such as Bentley and Wotton,† the young scholar-curate who had responded to William’s original essay with his own balanced Reflections. Swift cast William as a hero who drank draughts of spring water from his helmet (he had heard much no doubt of how William had been offered the ceremonial bell full of wine by the Bishop of Münster’s general) and so righteous and protected by the gods that the lance blows of the moderns fell impotent and unnoticed to the ground.

  When Swift published both satires after William’s death he was afraid to claim ownership but the stir they caused and the fact that he was widely accepted as the author did him no harm at all. His career was on its way. The satires did however immortalise William’s original argument beyond its intent, attracting ridicule from subsequent generations where otherwise it would have faded into quiet obscurity.

  William was approaching seventy and living at Moor Park with Martha, Jonathan Swift now that he had returned to the household, Esther (Swift’s Stella), who acted as a maid to Martha, Rebecca Dingley, who also attended Martha, and the other servants necessary to a gentleman’s small residence. His granddaughters and daughter-in-law would visit from the family house in London as did some of his nieces, daughters of his younger brother Sir John Temple of East Sheen. One of these, a favourite of Martha’s, was a young woman named after her, Jane Martha, the widowed Lady Berkeley. She became the Countess of Portland when she married in 1700 the king’s favourite, William Bentinck. Martha’s newsy letters to her show her preoccupation with her brother’s health as they both faced his inevitable decline.

  The glimpses Martha gives of William, whom she refers to their niece as ‘Papa’, showed him in pain, hobbling but still cheery enough and still enjoying the fruits of his gardens. This she wrote in the summer of 1697: ‘Thank God Papa is not very bad, I hear him just now going down stairs though with a lame knee. I will not brag of our melons till you come to taste them yourself.’90 Obviously the gout got an even greater grip on William that autumn, for by October Martha was writing of his first real meal of roast beef for some time. Given his belief that a rich diet exacerbated the disease this showed William thought himself recovered enough to attempt it again, but was prepared for the worst: ‘Papa wishes you hear too, at a piece of roast beef at dinner wch he eat for the first time with a very good stomach and I must tell you is now a great deal better, whatever comes after it. He has bin mighty weary with his hand since you went but all the old paines begin now to weare off, and he complains yet of no new ones [gout had a way of travelling round the joints].’91

  The following May an unseasonal frost descended on the country. Frost in May, when new growth and budding fruit reach out for warmth and light, is devastating. For William, whose last remaining pleasures centred on his garden and fruit trees, this blackening of green shoots and blighting of his autumn harvest can only have been a final grief to endure.

  By September he was well enough to travel with Martha to the Duke and Duchess of Somerset’s* mansion at Petworth in Sussex, some twenty miles or so distant, for a week of socialising, card games and conversation. The Somersets were a glamorous couple, in their thirties at the time, immensely rich due to the fortune that Lady Seymour brought to the marriage. Born Lady Elizabeth Percy, she was a member of the great Percy family and daughter of the Earl of Northumberland and was twice widowed before she was fifteen. The duke was handsome and very pleased with his place in the world, so much so that he was nicknamed the ‘Proud Duke’ and dismissed by Macaulay as being almost pathologically obsessed with his nobility and rank. They seemed to have been good acquaintances and near neighbours of the Temples who lived in much more modest circumstances at Moor Park.

  However, William’s legendary warmth of manner and conversational skill, together with his ability to get on well with anyone of any age and stratum of society, meant he was a popular guest wherever he went. Even in old age and some pain he retained his youthful zest. William had been a wild gambler at cards in his youth but soon learned that his enthusiasm was not matched by skill and he could not afford to go on losing so heavily. Although he gave up his high rolling days, he seemed to have retained the excitement of play even into old age. We get the last glimpse of William, obviously in better health than usual, revisiting one of his youthful pleasures in the company of friends: ‘We got hither[Petworth] at last, and Papa I thank God very well, and so insufferably pert with winning 12 guineas at Crimp last night. The Duke of Somersett says he never remembers seeing him better.’92

  William had written as an old man, ‘It is difficult to love life, and yet be willing to part with it’,93 but he also realised how much easier it was to die well if one had also lived well, a happy state he considered to be his. Written at the same time was a philosophical view that reflected his love of gambling and counterbalanced his emotional attachment to life: ‘After all, life is but a trifle, that should be played with till we lose it; and then it is not worth regretting.’94

  Although long expected, William’s death when it came seemed to take everyone by surprise. His sister believed that the pain of his gout had simply worn him out. In the early morning of 27 January 1699, in his seventy-first year, the once famous and feted statesman came to the end of his triumphs and suffering. His individualistic character, sensual, pleasure-loving, disdainful of power and tolerant of others, had a modernity about it that puzzled Victorian critics like Macaulay. For William Temple valued his private life, his family and his gardens more than any worldly ambition. He understood the fleetingness of fame and the futility of power and money in the absence of domestic happiness, freedom and self-respect. With heart and energy, he fulfilled his duty to his king as far as he was able, but despite a justifiable pride in his achievements turned his back on preferment and public acclaim to follow his own desires. William combined the vanity of a handsome and charming man, who had been much loved by the women in his life and admired by many men, with a true modesty and earthy good sense. He reflected the growing scientific interests of the age with his curiosity in all aspects of the world and his particular fascination and delight in gardens and horticulture, experimenting with various imported and hybridised fruit trees and sharing his findings – and the harvest of delicious fruit – with whoever was about.

  William’s sanguine acceptance of things as they are had included an untroubled acknowledgement of his own and others’ inevitable limitations. He had long argued that time and talents were finite and the way to a fulfilled life was to choose where your energies best became you, characteristically illustrating his point with a homely analogy: ‘The abilities of man must fall short on one side or the other, like too scanty a blanket when you are a-bed; if you pull it upon your shoulders, your feet are left bare; if you thrust it down upon your feet, your shoulders are uncovered.’95 It was natural for him to extend to himself the tolerance he offered others and his confidence that he had lived as well as he could, and amusement at his own shortcomings, reflected the affection and admiration that had nurtured him all his life, from parents, his Hammond uncle, younger siblings, three British kings and their advisors and, most effectively of all, his discerning wife.

  Nearly all William’s writing reveals his attitude to life, but these two aide-mémoires written in old age, plain as they are, encapsulate something true about a man who had been accused in his own time of being atheistic and epicurea
n, libertarian, even republican in spirit, and disappointingly lacking in ambition:

  To submit blindly to none, to preserve the liberty of one’s own reason, to dispute for instruction, not victory, and yield to reason as soon as it appears to us, from whence soever it comes.96

  The greatest pleasure of life is love: the greatest treasure is contentment: the greatest possession is health: the greatest ease is sleep: and the greatest medicine is a true friend.97

  Swift wrote in his journal: ‘He died at one o’clock this morning, and with him all that was good and amiable among men.’98 He later wrote this character sketch of the man who had employed him for the best part of a decade, left him a legacy of £100 and ‘the care and trust and advantage of publishing his posthumous writings’:99 ‘He was a person of the greatest wisdom, justice, liberality, politeness, eloquence of his age and nation; the truest lover of his country, and one that deserved more from it by his eminent public services than any man before or since: besides his great deserving of the commonwealth of learning; having been universally esteemed the most accomplished writer of his time.’100

  Martha received many letters of condolence, her friends being as concerned about her loneliness now as they were with the admirable qualities of her brother. The letter from Henry Sidney, by then Earl of Romney and still a charmer and irrepressible friend, was the most simple and heartfelt of all: ‘I believe I am the last of all your friends that have condoled with you the losse you have had and I believe without any dispute I am the man in the world that is the most sensible and the most concern’d att it, both for your sake and my owne for I never loved anybody better than I did him.’101

  In the end, perhaps William Temple was held in more honour abroad than at home. The Duc de Saint-Simon, brought up in Louis XIV’s court at Versailles, at the heart of William’s political bête noire, wrote this in his celebrated memoirs:

  England … lost, though a private individual, one of its principal ornaments, namely the Knight Temple, equally reputed for his early achievements in letters and the sciences as for his career in government and politics, and who made a great name for himself in the highest embassies and the first plans for general peace. He was a man of great wit, diplomacy, firmness and skill, but a plain man, with no concern for appearances, who liked to enjoy himself, and to live free as a true Englishman, without any worry about rank, wealth or fortune. Everywhere he had many friends, and noble friends at that, who were yet honoured by their association with him.102

  He ended by writing how rare it was to find a politician of such disinterested and straightforward nature, implying it would be a long time before the world saw his like again.

  William had asked that his heart be buried under the sundial at Moor Park in the garden he had created with Dorothy, the Eden of their old age and refuge from the world: the one achievement that no one could take from him. His body was buried in a simple family ceremony beside his wife and daughter Diana in Westminster Abbey. Uxorious and family-minded to the end, William had asked that a plaque be erected once Martha too had died. Commemorating the beloved dead he wrote:

  Taking Leave of All Those Airy Visions

  Sibi Suisque Charissimis,

  DIANAE TEMPLE

  Dilectissimae Filiae,

  DOROTHEAE OSBORN

  Conjunctissimae Conjugi,

  Et MARTHAE GIFFARD

  Optimae Sorori,

  Hoc Qualecumque Monumentum

  poni curavit

  GULIELMUS TEMPLE de Moorpark

  In Agro SURRIENSI Baronettus.

  For most dear to himself and his own,

  Diana Temple, most beloved of daughters

  Dorothy Osborne, the most intimately wedded of wives

  And Martha Giffard, the most virtuous of sisters

  This monument, such as it is,

  was appointed by

  William Temple, Baronet of Moor Park in Surrey

  It was perhaps significant that in this public memorial to his family and himself, William chose to restore to his wife her maiden name, Dorothy Osborne, despite the fact that she had spent more than forty years as Dorothy Temple. It was as Dorothy Osborne that she had written her remarkable letters to him, the letters that he so carefully preserved, that would ensure her lasting immortality. He already knew their power, they had kept him close and faithful to her through their long, enforced separation: perhaps he also had some intimation that if ever they were brought to public notice they would broadcast down the centuries the epic story of their love, the obstacles they had overcome, the failure of spirit and the rising again of defiance and hope. It was he after all who had written to Dorothy in those first few rapturous years, ‘so are those true storys [best] wch are likest Romances’, inevitably thinking of their own story, and she, hardly daring to believe, had echoed it with her cry, ‘can there bee a more Romance Story then ours would make if the conclusion should prove happy?’ The letters followed their halting and anguished progress to that happy conclusion at last. As their life together began, there was no further need of the letters’ insinuating and binding power and they fell silent and William and Martha took up the tale. But it was always Dorothy, ‘the most intimately wedded’ of wives and a woman of acknowledged intellect, spirited heart and epistolary genius who remained at the centre of it all.

  * * *

  * Virgil, Georgics IV, 132.

  * Pall mall was a game much like early croquet, played in an alley with a large boxwood ball, a mallet and a steel hoop. The aim was to hit the ball down the alley and through the hoop at the end with as few strokes as possible. It was popular in Italy and France and became fashionable in England in the seventeenth century.

  * These days it is recognised as linked to defects in purine metabolism that cause increased production of uric acid that then forms crystals deposited in the joints and tendons, provoking inflammation and extreme pain. Historically, it is known that lead sugar was used to sweeten wine and so inadvertent lead poisoning was also a cause of gout. People with untreated gout often developed kidney stones and suffered eventual kidney failure and death.

  * Constantijn Huygens (1628–97) was an artist and art connoisseur, as well as the author of poems in Latin. His brother Christiaan Huygens (1629–95) was a brilliant scientist elected to the Royal Society in 1663. Their father Sir Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) was a leading Dutch intellectual, poet and composer.

  * Judge George Jeffreys (1648–89), educated at Cambridge University and the Inner Temple, was involved in the prosecutions during the Popish Plot scare, the Rye House Plot and the Monmouth rebellion. His ruthlessness in executing or deporting hundreds of rebels earned him the epithet ‘Bloody’ Judge Jeffreys. Lord chancellor from 1685, he was captured trying to follow James II into exile and died in the Tower aged forty-one.

  ** William Russell (Baron Russell) (1639–83) was a son of the first Duke of Bedford and elected an MP in 1660. He played a prominent part in the campaign for the exclusion of James, Duke of York, from the succession. Executed as a traitor.

  † Algernon Sidney (1622–83), second son of the 2nd Earl of Leicester, became a radical republican having initially fought for Charles I in the first civil war. A distinguished soldier under Cromwell, he then grew critical of his increasingly autocratic rule. Went into exile at the restoration and eventually returned in 1677 but became embroiled in the hysteria around the Popish Plot and then implicated, though unconvincingly, in the Rye House Plot, his revolutionary writings (promoting tyrannicide) used to incriminate him. Executed as a traitor, he became a martyr in the eighteenth century to the cause of radical Whiggery.

  ‡ Anthony Ashley Cooper (1st Earl of Shaftesbury) (1621–83), politician who was prominent under Cromwell but welcomed back into the royalist fold on the restoration of Charles II. After loyal service to Charles he was made an earl, served on the ill-fated Privy Council with William Temple, and then became a leader of the opposition, largely due to the general antipathy to Charles’s pro-French po
licies and fear of a Catholic monarchy. He became a magnet for other disaffected interests and the battle between the court party (the Tories) and the country party (the Whigs) was long-running, impassioned and ferocious. In an atmosphere of fear of civil war with arrests and executions, he escaped to the Netherlands but his health collapsed and he died within weeks.

  * Edmund Halley (1656–1742), astronomer and fellow of the Royal Society at the age of twenty-two. He funded the publication of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia. His fame was assured by Halley’s Comet, but his achievements and work ranged wide, including the first compilation of charts that allowed calculation of life expectancy at various ages.

  * Extrapolating backwards, theologians have suggested that the Star of Bethlehem may have been an early sighting of Halley’s Comet. The comet was also seen in England in 1066 and feared then as an ill omen. The Normans subsequently invaded and King Harold was killed at the Battle of Hastings: the comet appeared memorialised in the Bayeux tapestry. Eilmer, the remarkable Flying Monk of Malmesbury, possibly saw the comet in 989 as a young boy, a sighting followed by one of the waves of Danish invasion that destroyed the monastery at Malmesbury. When a young man, he attempted to fly from the abbey tower with feather wings strapped to his arms and feet. He was surprisingly successful, gliding for more than a furlong (220 yards) before landing rather suddenly and breaking both legs. A second attempt, but with a tail also attached, was forbidden by his abbot and he became a scholar instead, his limping figure a much loved sight about town during his long life. Eilmer also saw the comet of 1066 and full of foreboding was reputed to have said, ‘You’ve come, have you? You’ve come, you source of many tears to many mothers. It is long since I saw you; but as I see you now you are much more terrible, for I see you brandishing the downfall of my country’ (Gesta Regum Anglorum [Deeds of the English Kings] William of Malmesbury).