Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  * William Temple’s biographer Homer E. Woodbridge (1940) made the significant discovery of John and Marie’s marriage certificate and was able to verify both the date of marriage and John’s birth, by Temple’s first and influential biographer Courtenay. Allegations for Marriage Licences issued by the Bishop of London, 1611–1828, Armytage, vol. II, p. 306.

  † About £175,000 per annum, before his sharing it out with his son.

  * Henry Brouncker, 3rd Viscount Brouncker (1627–88), was the younger brother of William Brouncker who was a navy commissioner, Pepys’s colleague and also secretary of the Royal Society. Henry graduated from Oxford as a doctor of medicine and became an MP from 1665 to 1668. He was a famous chess player and described by John Evelyn as ‘ever noted for hard covetous vicious man, but for his worldly craft and skill in gaming few exceeded him’. He was cordially disliked by everyone.

  † Armand de Gramont, Comte de Guiche (1637–73), was the eldest son of the Duc de Gramont and fought in the Dutch navy against the English in the Four Days Battle (June 1666). His memoirs were published in 1744.

  * John Maurice of Nassau (1604–79), Prince of Nassau-Siegen from 1674. His grandfather was the oldest brother of the famous William ‘the Silent’ of Orange. He early made a name for himself on the battlefield and in 1637 was appointed governor of the Dutch possessions in Brazil. He transformed the town of Recife with gracious new buildings and, an enlightened governor, he ruled over a civilised, tolerant society where Catholics, Protestants and Jews all participated on the city council. His return to Europe and warfare saw him excel once again as a soldier and a leader and when William Temple met him he was in his sixties and commander-in-chief of the Dutch forces on land in their successful battle against the Bishop of Münster.

  * Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnel (1630–91), a Catholic member of the old English squirearchy, was active in the Irish wars against Cromwell and became a member of the future James II’s household after the restoration. Implicated in the Popish Plot fiasco, he escaped into exile in Ireland. After James II came to the throne he was made Earl of Tyrconnel and commander-in-chief of the Irish forces, and then lord deputy of Ireland. He raised an Irish army to support James when he invaded in 1689 and was made Duke of Tyrconnel by James, a title only recognised by the Jacobites.

  * The war was ended the following year, 1690, when William III, at the head of his troops, defeated James at the Battle of the Boyne. James returned to exile in France but Irish resistance continued for another year until William modified the swingeing penalties in his harsh peace terms.

  * This nephew John was nine years old as was her own granddaughter Elizabeth. These two cousins would marry one day and eventually live in Moor Park.

  * Possibly William’s great friend Henry Sidney, who was lord justice in Ireland until 1690.

  * Ménière’s disease is a disorder of the inner ear with symptoms that include dizziness, nausea, vomiting, unsteadiness, headache, tinnitus, abdominal discomfort and hearing loss. Stress can make the symptoms worse.

  * Béat Louis de Muralt (1665–1749), Swiss traveller and writer whose book Lettres sur le Anglois et les François et sur les Voiages was published in 1725 and became controversial and highly influential. He had travelled to France and England in 1694–5 and wrote a comparative study of the usages and customs of the English and French that proved to be a pioneering work in shifting Swiss and German interests away from French classicism towards English achievements and attitudes. His Deist views, picked up on his travels, meant he was banished on his return to Bern. He began to destroy his letters but most were rescued and those that survived made up the book, which was initially circulated in manuscript form.

  * George Byng, 1st Viscount Torrington (1668–1733), admiral and statesman, had a stellar career under William III, George I and George II. He was created First Lord of the Admiralty in 1727 and had fifteen surviving children, eleven of them sons. His third son was the notorious John Byng, the admiral who was executed on board ship in 1757 for ‘not doing his utmost’ in a battle at the beginning of the Seven Years War. Voltaire satirised this swingeing punishment in Candide when his heroine is told, having witnessed the execution by firing squad of a naval officer, ‘Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un admiral pour encourager les autres’.

  * Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757), French intellectual and author, leader of the French Academy of Sciences and man of letters. As popular in the cultural life of France in his day as Voltaire and a proponent of Descartes, he lived to an almost unbelievable age, publishing into his nineties and dying one month short of his hundredth year.

  * Epistles of Phalaris were 148 forged Greek letters signed with the signature of Phalaris, a Sicilian tyrant and torturer of the sixth century BC. The letters set out to represent him instead as a gentle ruler and patron of the arts.

  † William Wotton (1666–1727), linguist and scholar, could read the Bible in English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew before he was six. He went to Cambridge University before he was ten and there added the Arabic and Aramaic languages to his repertoire, while studying a full range of logic, philosophy, mathematics, geography and history, ending up being ordained in 1691. He is most remembered now through Swift’s satire when he was attacked for pedantry, although his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694) was judicious and fair.

  * Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset (1662–1748), succeeded to the dukedom after his elder brother Francis was shot dead, aged only twenty, by an outraged husband in Italy. He supported the Prince of Orange during the Glorious Revolution, became master of the horse in 1702 in Queen Anne’s reign and retained it under George I. He married the heiress Elizabeth Percy (1667–1722) in 1682 when she was fifteen, thereby gaining her vast estates, including Petworth House, Alnwick Castle and Syon House. They had four children, the last, Lady Anne Seymour, after a gap of sixteen years, when the duchess was forty-two. Anne died just four days after her mother at the age of thirteen.

  AFTERWORD

  MARTHA GIFFARD WAS sixty when her brother William, for so long the focus of her devotion, died. She had married when she was twenty-three and enjoyed less than a fortnight of life with her new husband when one of the mysterious fatal diseases of the time made her a widow before she had even become established as a wife. It is remarkable that this attractive young woman, left a title and some independent fortune, should never have contemplated remarriage at a time when it was automatically expected, even socially required. For Martha, her embrace of widowhood for the next sixty years might have reflected the same devotion to her youthful husband as her father had shown for his wife: it may equally have reflected the exact opposite, for she had attained the status of being a married woman (and the freedom of an independent income) without the duties and usual loss of autonomy involved in having a living husband. It was more likely, however, that no other man could challenge her lifelong love and admiration for her eldest brother, or offer her a more attractive life than the one of emotional and intellectual diversions without responsibility she lived in the Temples’ household for the next four decades.

  Martha derived great pleasure in being at the intimate heart of life with William and Dorothy and their children: she had excitement and worldly experience too from accompanying her brother on most of his diplomatic postings abroad. She and William looked very alike with their luxuriant hair and lively eyes and may well have shared a similar romantic temperament and view of the world. She was closely involved in the lives of Dorothy and William’s children and took an abiding interest in her extended family.

  After the deaths of Dorothy and then William, Martha lived on at Moor Park, despite family and friends expressing their anxiety about her isolation there. King William was one of the many who expressed his affection and concern for her. In the midst of her immediate grief Martha commissioned a clergyman called Savage to deliver a sermon at a memorial service for her brother in the church at Farnham. This eulogy has n
ever been published and a later family member, Miss Longe, who read it before it was lost in a subsequent dispersal of papers, noted it was too fruity in its praise even for the most ardent Temple groupie. Valiant and full of vitality still, Martha did not retreat into a mournful twilight. Instead during the rest of her long life she pursued her friendships and family connections, writing and receiving letters, visiting in various town and country houses, busy to the last. In 1722 she died at the great age of eighty-four, a Stuart lady who had lived into the beginning of the Georgian age.

  Only one major storm ruffled her composure: in 1709 Jonathan Swift sold his copy of William Temple’s third volume of memoirs to a bookseller for publication, without consulting her. Swift had the right to publish, as William’s literary executor, but it was a failure of diplomacy and good manners on his part that caused Martha such anger and concern. It appears that her overriding anxiety was that some critical passages in it about the Earl of Essex might upset his elderly widow, Lady Essex, whose family bereavements (including the death of her only daughter and the suicide of her husband, while imprisoned on suspicion of treason) had been the cause of extreme distress. In fact Martha had decided against publication on the advice of various family members and friends as keen as she was not to cause offence to the living. She wrote an angry letter to Swift and denounced in an advertisement the veracity of the copy he had used for publication.

  Jonathan Swift responded reasonably, pointing out that in seeking publication he was only doing what her brother had asked him to do and assuring her that the copy he used was more accurate than the one in her hands as it included all the author’s corrections, as dictated by William to Swift. He explained that he chose to publish without Martha’s permission because he knew it would be controversial and wanted to absolve her of responsibility. He was also afraid that as she had shown the manuscript in her possession to so many people a pirated and less accurate version might have been printed, to his pecuniary and William’s authorial disadvantage. Martha never forgave Swift.

  Jonathan Swift was thirty-one when William Temple died. He had been ordained into the Church but appeared at that time to have few prospects. He had been left £100 in the will and been appointed William’s literary executor, with any money from the future sale of copyrights on William’s works due to him. He stayed on at Moor Park for about a month, no doubt collecting and arranging William’s papers and dealing with various administrative duties for the family. He then went to London to try to follow up some of William’s connections at court in the hopes of a position in England. When nothing came of this he eventually returned to Ireland.

  Jonathan Swift went to work quickly on the Temple papers and was responsible for the editing and publication of the two volumes of Letters Written by Sir W. Temple, Bart and other Ministers of State, in 1700; Miscellanea, the third part, in 1701; Select Letters to the Prince of Orange, etc. Vol. III, 1701, and Memoirs, the third part. From the peace concluded 1679 to the time of the author’s retirement from public business, in 1709. For Swift, initially unknown and somewhat rebarbative in manner, association as editor with someone of William Temple’s reputation and charm can only have done him good, along with the modest financial advantages earned from these publications (he received the equivalent of just over £3,000 for the controversial memoirs). However, starting with his two satires The Battle of the Books and A Tale of a Tub, written while at Moor Park but only published (and then anonymously) in 1704, he began to build his reputation as the great political satirist, poet and pamphleteer whose fame would far outlast his patron’s. His years with the Temple family at Moor Park have provided his biographers with the fascinating conundrum as to just how much they influenced his subsequent emotional development, his politics and uniquely inventive literary style.

  Dorothy and William’s grandchildren lived on with their French mother Marie in the Temples’ London house in Pall Mall after their father John’s death. This house was left to Marie in William’s will and his property divided between his sister, his brother John and his granddaughters, Elizabeth (Betty) and Dorothy. The grandchildren also visited Moor Park often and Martha continued to take a lively interest in them as they grew. Betty married her cousin John Temple, son of Martha’s and William’s brother John. She, together with her husband and family, ended up living at Moor Park when Martha eventually vacated it for a smaller residence.

  Betty’s sister Dorothy married Nicholas Bacon of Shrubland in Suffolk and as none of her sister’s children survived their mother, Dorothy inherited her grandmother’s famous letters, along with other Osborne/Temple possessions. Sir William’s younger brother John was far more fortunate in his family in that all six of his daughters reached maturity along with his two sons. His family subsequently could boast two prime ministers, although the first was a step-relation. Martha Temple, favourite of the aunt after whom she was named, by her first marriage became Lady Berkeley and then the Countess of Portland by her second to King William’s favourite, William Bentinck, by then much ennobled and enriched. His great-grandson by his first marriage became the Georgian prime minister, Henry Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland, known more for his good looks than his political success. On the other hand, Sir John’s eldest son Henry was created 1st Viscount Palmerston and his great-grandson, another Henry Temple, the 3rd Viscount Palmerston, became the hugely popular Victorian prime minister whose name lives on for the longevity and breadth of his political influence, his sense of humour, vitality and charm (he was cited in a divorce case at the age of seventy-nine).

  Another interesting parallel of intersected relationships was made when Sir Basil Dixwell, the son of Dorothy Osborne’s favourite niece, the Dorothy Peyton who used to enliven her aunt’s days at Chicksands when she came to stay, married another of Sir John’s daughters (and niece to William, Dorothy and Martha), herself called Dorothy Temple. Sir Basil was a wealthy landowner and member of parliament whose magnificent Carolean brick mansion Broome Park still stands three and a half centuries later, although like the Hertfordshire Moor Park and many such grand houses its grounds are now a golf course and the mansion is available for hire as a wedding venue.

  Dorothy and William’s first English house at Crown Court in West Sheen, left to their son John’s family, was eventually pulled down in the late 1760s, some hundred years after they had built it, along with the remains of the monastery and seventeen other houses, including a calico manufacturer. The little hamlet of West Sheen that had grown up on the fertile soil of the ancient monastery, and had included William’s celebrated fruit gardens, was flattened, reseeded with grass and absorbed into the young George III’s royal parkland at Richmond.

  Moor Park, the house and garden where William and Dorothy had retired to build another garden, still stands against the wooded hill, where they all walked to Mother Ludlum’s Hole, the trees clinging to the steep escarpment, the cave and stream mysterious still. Seventy-five acres of the original estate remain. The facade of the house has been altered, the garden no longer planted to William’s design, but Moor Park lives on, in use as offices, the main part given over to the Constance Spry Association, offering courses in flower design, cooking, entertaining and etiquette. The pattering footsteps of young women and the scent of flowers breathe life into rooms where Dorothy’s magnificent embroidered coverlet is framed on a wall, together with the hanks of her embroidery silks, the special cabinet that contained her letters, the collection of seals and family portraits.

  It is probably useful to explain at this point how Dorothy’s branch of the Osborne family lost the ‘e’ at the end of their surname. Some time between the 2nd baronet, Sir John Osborne, and the 3rd, Sir Danvers Osborn, Sir John’s son, another John Osborne, decided it would be sensible to change the spelling of the family name to Osborn to differentiate the family from that of his cousin, the Duke of Leeds. This John Osborne had married the Honourable Sarah Byng in 1710 and died nine years later, at the age of thirty-six, before he could inherit the barone
tcy. Their five-year-old son became the 3rd baronet, Sir Danvers Osborn, minus the ‘e’, in 1720. At the age of thirty-eight, Sir Danvers sailed for New York to become governor there. Tragically, his heart had been so broken by his wife’s death, only three years after their marriage, that he never recovered his spirits: in New York, so far from family and home, he was apparently overwhelmed with despair and committed suicide shortly after the celebrations welcoming him to the city.

  Generations of Osborn family members were born, suffered and died, but the house endured. Chicksands, the estate that Dorothy Osborne’s father fought to save, the house where she spent many years writing to her lover and dreaming of a different life, has survived the centuries remarkably intact. Osborns continued to live there as soldiers, members of parliament, local dignitaries and country gentlemen right into the twentieth century when Sir Algernon Osborn, the 7th baronet, sold the estate in 1938 to the crown. In 1939 Chicksands was taken over by the Air Ministry and Royal Air Force and it became an essential listening post, intercepting messages and passing them on for decoding to nearby Bletchley Park, and also broadcasting for the BBC (sometimes with encoded messages for resistance fighters) when Bristol was bombed. After the war in 1950, the American Air Force moved into Chicksands to continue surveillance, with the help of a vast ring of antennae, known locally as ‘the elephant cage’. Their occupation and use of the priory continued until 1995 when the Americans went home and the Ministry of Defence took it on. The Defence Intelligence and Security Centre was set up to train all the three services and some civilians in a wide range of intelligence skills.