Read My Heart: Dorothy Osborne and Sir William Temple, A Love Story in the Age of Revolution

The celebration was short-lived, for their mother did not recover from the birth. Her long and painful decline, probably due to blood poisoning from puerperal fever, was endured by everyone in the household with increasing horror and dread. They watched over her for nine days before death inexorably claimed her.

William’s father, although only thirty-eight when his wife died, never married again. At a time when widowers invariably remarried quickly, this was highly significant as to the depth of his devotion and became a powerful part of the family lore on the constancy of love. Sir John expressed something of his feelings to his friend Leicester on whose estate his wife had just died:

I know your Lordship hath understood of the sad conditions it hath pleased the Lord to cast me into, since my return to these parts; your Penshurst was the place where God saw fit to take from me the desire of mine eyes, and the most dear companion of my life – a place that must never be forgotten by me, not only in regard of those blessed ashes that lie now treasured up there, and my desires that by your Lordship’s favor cum fatalis et meus dies venerit [when my fatal day should come], I may return to that dust.

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William was ten at the time of his mother’s death. As the eldest son he would have carried much of the burden of the family’s grief, particularly given his father’s shocked despair. With his mother dead and his father distraught, the existence of these twin babies, christened quickly the day after their birth in case they did not survive, were a consolation and proof of the continuity of life. From time immemorial twins have had a certain magic. In an age of high infant mortality their survival could be seen as close to miraculous. It seemed that the babies remained at the rectory and were under the care, along with William, and probably the other children too, of their Hammond grandmother. Out of those emotionally fraught days of grief for his dead mother and hope for the flickering lives of his new brother and sister, William nurtured a lifelong protectiveness and love for this baby sister Martha, and she a passionate connection with him.

At no time perhaps was Dr Hammond’s legendary sweetness of disposition and spiritual certainty more needed. His house had been the stage for this familial tragedy; now with his sister dead, his young nieces and nephews deprived of a mother, the family could only turn to him as a man of God. His A Practical Catechism, published six years later and written in conversational style, revealed his humane approach to living a godly life full of the kind of scholarly explication and pragmatic advice that his students and more questioning parishioners sought. He pointed out, for instance, that there were practical expressions in everyday life of Christ’s resurrection to help those grieving, the simplest being to ‘rise to new life’.

(#litres_trial_promo) And his emphasis on the benign paternity of God offered soothing words in a crisis that seemed bleached of reason: ‘the word “Father” implying His preparing for us an inheritance, His glorious excellence, and after that His paternal goodness and mercy to us, in feeding us and disposing all, even the saddest, accidents, to our greatest good, is a sufficient motive and ground of love’.

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Supported by avuncular insight and kindness and the practical care of his grandmother, William appeared to accept Uncle Henry’s exhortation to live in the present and trust in the goodness of God. He was naturally a far more energetic and robust child than his uncle had been and while an intelligent and intellectually curious boy he did not share the extraordinary aptitude for study and self-effacement shown by the student Hammond at Eton and Oxford. Sports and the outdoor life held as much attraction to William as his books. However, he shared with his uncle the distinction of height and great good looks. His sister Martha described him with some embarrassment, she wrote, because the truth sounded too flattering to be impartial: ‘He was rather tall then low [than short] his shape when he was young very exact [in perfect proportion]. His hair a darke browne curl’d naturally … His eyes gray but very lively. In his youth lean but extream active; soe yt nobody acquitted them selves better at all sorts of exercise, & had more spirit & life in his humor [disposition] then ever I saw in any body.’

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Dorothy later, agreeing with Martha that William’s hair was a crowning glory, complained that he barely bothered to brush it: ‘You are soe necgligent on’t and keep it soe ill tis pitty you should have it.’

(#litres_trial_promo) It was an illuminating glimpse of a naturally handsome man who nevertheless seemed to lack personal vanity of this kind.

All his life William Temple was to find the countryside more congenial than the town, gardening and family life more sympathetic than the sophistic toils of court. He had a highly developed sense of smell and a love of the sweet scent of earth, fresh air and fruit straight from the tree. When he first arrived in Kent as a boy he had left behind his early life in the biggest and smelliest city of them all. He found Dr Hammond living in the parsonage house that he had recently refurbished, ‘repaired with very great expense (the annual charge of £100) … till from an incommodius ruin, he had rendered it a fair and pleasant dwelling’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The garden was also replanted and the orchards restored.

The adult William’s delight in his own home life, his garden and simple things was nurtured when he was a boy in the care of his uncle. Dr Hammond’s biographer noted the scholar’s abstemiousness: ‘his diet was of the plainest meats … Sauces he scarce ever tasted of … In the time of his full and more vigorous health he seldom did eat or drink more than once every twenty-four hours.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Although of a much more sensual nature, William was influenced by the simplicity of his life at Penshurst and, as his sister Martha noticed later, he would rather eat at home than out, and when at home, ‘of as little as he thought fit for his company: alwayes of the plainest meats but the best chosen, & commonly din’d himselfe of ye first dish or whatever stood next him, & said he was made for a farmer & not a courtier, & understood being a shepheard & a gardener better than an Ambassador’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He did however indulge all his life in good wine, even when in his later years it cruelly exacerbated his gout.

With the advantages of experience and hindsight, William wrote his recipe for the social education of a young gentleman, with some recognition of what the Hammond household offered him when a boy: ‘The best rules to form a young man: to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one’s own opinions, and value others that deserve it.’

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Apart from learning by example about general hospitality towards others, modest conduct and the necessity for altruism in one’s actions in the world, William was also set to study more conventional subjects. Dr Hammond’s wide learning ranged over Greek and Latin, Hebrew (William doodled the Hebrew alphabet in one of his essay books), philosophy and the natural sciences, rhetoric, divinity and literature both ancient and modern. He had an extraordinary fluency in writing, starting on his elegantly argued sermons often as late as the early morning of the Sunday he was to preach and writing pages of well-reasoned and original prose straight off, quoting copiously and often rather creatively from memory. Hammond hated idleness, and never slept more than four or five hours a night, going to bed at midnight and rising before dawn. He filled his days with study, prayer and tireless pastoral care, visiting the sick and dying even while they had highly infectious diseases such as smallpox. No moment was wasted; even the everyday necessities of dressing and undressing were achieved with a book propped open beside him.

Although young William was a boy of ability and tremendous charm, inevitably his lack of superhuman dedication to study and denial of the senses were to be a disappointment to his uncle. This sporty boy loved tennis and outdoor pursuits. As he entered middle age, his sister reported he ‘grew lazy’ though all his life he had practised the ideal of effortless brilliance, ‘it had bin observed to be part of his character never to seem busy in his greatest imployments’. Like his uncle, and indeed his father, he showed little concern for material fortune and was disinclined to do anything he did not value merely to earn a living: ‘[he] was such a lover of liberty yt I remember when he was young, & his fortunes low, to have heard him say he would not be obliged for five hundred pounds a year to step every day over a Gutter yt was in ye street before his door’.

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Certainly Dr Hammond managed to inculcate Greek and Latin into his nephew and William learned to write philosophical essays in the most pleasing and mellifluous style. All those sermons he had to sit through found some expression in his youthful exhortatory works in which he built up great rhetorical pyramids musing on subjects such as hope and the vagaries of fortune. William was fortunate indeed to have Dr Hammond as his tutor, for this was a man of great gentleness and tolerance, even in the face of his pupil’s lack of application or lapses of concentration. The good doctor was well known for living by his claim that ‘he delighted to be loved, not reverenced’.

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In his friends’ view Henry Hammond was saintly, self-sacrificing and preternaturally meek; even if only half true it meant that a lively, attractive boy like William had a great deal of freedom and much kindness and affection from both his uncle and his Hammond grandmother, herself the daughter of a religious scholar. He did not have to endure the harsh regimes that characterised the upbringing of most of his contemporaries, where an absolute obliviousness to the emotional or psychological welfare of the individual child meant a schooling enforced by fear and flogging.

It was widely accepted by parents and teachers alike that educating young children, the males particularly, was akin to breaking horses – in the old-fashioned way by cracking whips not whispering. John Aubrey, an exact contemporary of both William and Dorothy, felt keenly the lack of parental sympathy and understanding in his own youth, a condition that he considered the norm in the first half of the seventeenth century: ‘The Gentry and the Citizens had little learning of any kind, and their way of breeding up their children was suitable to the rest: for whereas ones child should be ones nearest Friend, and the time of growing-up should be most indulged, they were as severe to their children as their schoolmaster; and their Scoolmasters, [were as severe] as masters of the House of correction [a prison charged with reforming prisoners]. The child perfectly loathed the sight of his parents, as the slave his torturer.’

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By this time the Renaissance ideal of education was degraded, with classics reduced to the drudgery of learning everything by rote and it was accepted that Latin and Greek, for instance, had to be whipped into a boy. The contemporary schoolmaster and writer Henry Peacham,

(#ulink_c892cda8-c58b-5c8f-87e8-ea1e9f952928) in his book on etiquette for the upper classes, described with resignation the cruelties that most educators believed had to be inflicted on boys in order to turn them into scholars: ‘pulled by the ears, lashed over the face, beaten about the head with the great end of the rod, smitten upon the lips for every slight offence with the ferula’.

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In marked contrast William Temple’s boyhood education was almost exclusively in the benign company of an uncle who could not bring himself even to raise his voice in anger and sought instead to teach by encouragement and example. Henry Hammond’s friend and colleague Dr Fell seemed to approve of this pacifist approach to teaching: ‘his little phrase, “Don’t be simple,” had more power to charm a passion than long harangues from others.’

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When the boy William wasn’t sitting over his books or being coaxed to a love of study, he was free to explore the gardens and grounds of the estate, etching still deeper his natural affinity with the rural life. When a father himself, William replicated these early experiences in the freedom he allowed his own children and the affectionate indulgence with which he treated them. In one of his later essays he wrote that despite choosing personal liberty always over material gain, matters of the heart were of even greater priority, ‘yet to please a mistress, save a beloved child, serve his country or friend, [this man] will sacrifice all the ease of his life, nay his blood and life too, upon occasion’.

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In fact the most violent treatment William had to endure while in the care of his uncle was the medical treatment at the time for various common ailments: ‘I remembered the cure of chilblains, when I was a boy, (which may be called the children’s gout,) by burning at the fire, or else by scalding brine.’ He recalled too how a deep wound when he was a youth was ‘cured by scalding medicament, after it was grown so putrefied as to have (in the surgeon’s opinion) endangered the bone; and the violent swelling and bruise of another taken away as soon as I received it, by scalding it with milk’.

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Both William and his uncle shared a love of music. Dr Hammond, particularly in the youthful period of his life when he was in loco parentis for his nephew, would accompany himself on the harpsichon, a kind of virginal, or take up his theorbo, a large double-necked bass lute, and play and sing ‘after the toil and labour of the day, and before the remaining studies of the night’.

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The kind of music-making indulged in by William and his uncle at Penshurst was of an unexacting domestic kind, practised in the home, sometimes in the company of a few country friends. In joining in the relaxation at the end of the day by playing and listening to music, William was merely doing what most people were doing across the land, in church, court and country. Aubrey famously declared: ‘When I was a Boy every Gentleman almost kept a Harper in his house: and some of them could versifie.’

(#litres_trial_promo) For him the ‘Civill Warres’ changed everything, but informal music-making would continue regardless: Dorothy Osborne’s shepherdesses singing in the fields in summer remained just part of the rich musicality of a time when all classes of people made music domestically and turned to each other for entertainment.

This youthful interlude in a rural paradise under his uncle’s care had to come to an end. About the age of eleven, William left Penshurst and was sent to board at the grammar school at Bishop’s Stortford, a town some thirty miles from London and twenty-six from Cambridge. Despite an inevitably rude awakening to school life, this was as happy a choice as possible, for the school’s reputation and success were in rapid ascendancy under the inspired headship of Thomas Leigh. He not only set up Latin and writing schools but was also instrumental in building a library of repute, partially by insisting that every pupil donate a book as a leaving present. His regime was more tolerant and less violent than elsewhere. When he finally retired in the 1660s after a triumphant forty-seven years at the helm the school went into rapid decline, but he was still in charge while William and his younger brothers were schooled there. All his life William Temple retained his respect for Mr Leigh to whom, he was wont to say, ‘he was beholding for all he knew of Latin & Greek’.

(#litres_trial_promo) His sister Martha added that he managed to retain all his Latin perfectly but regretted losing much of his Greek.

By the beginning of the 1640s William was just a teenager and still safely in school while the kingdom’s political certainties fell apart. For most of William’s life, Charles I had ruled without parliament, having dissolved his rebellious House of Commons, he hoped for ever, in 1629. The country had limped on under the king’s absolute rule until Scotland, always resistant to coercion, kicked back. Charles’s pig-headed insistence on imposing a Book of Common Prayer on the country of his birth brought to the fore long-held Scottish resentments against the crown. Two inflammatory passions that had so effectively driven the Scottish reformation, the hatred of foreign interference and of popery, were reignited. The eminent moderate Presbyterian Robert Baillie was shocked at the blind and murderous fury he found on the streets of his native Glasgow: ‘the whole people thinks poperie at the doores … no man may speak any thing in publick for the king’s part, except he would have himself marked for a sacrifice to be killed one day. I think our people possessed with a bloody devill, far above any thing that ever I could have imagined.’

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Equally blind in his anger and faced with approaching war, Charles refused to capitulate. His inability to finance any sustained war forced him to recall in 1640 what became known as the Short Parliament. The members, given eloquent voice by John Pym, were too full of grievances over the misrule of the last eleven years to be in any mood to cooperate with the king’s demands, and Charles was in no mood to make amends. Within three weeks he dissolved this parliament. Barely six months later, his authority fatally undermined, forced to surrender to the Scottish terms and cripplingly short of money, the king had little recourse but to recall parliament for a second time. The sitting that began in November 1640 became known as the Long Parliament, hailed as a triumph for the people.

Sitting simultaneously to both Short and Long Parliaments was the convocation of divines, one of whom was William’s uncle Dr Hammond. With the introduction of seventeen new canons of ecclesiastical law, Charles intended to have his clergy insist from the pulpit on the power of monarchy. He also sought to make the subject matter and rituals of church service conform to a model that was anathema to the growing Puritan element among his clergy, with the altar being railed off, for instance. As a loyal supporter of the king, Dr Hammond was in the minority in this gathering. With parliament and king increasingly polarised and military action looming, Dr Hammond’s uncompromising position made him vulnerable. By 1643, in the middle of the first civil war, his vicarage was sacked and he was forced to flee his parish to seek refuge in Oxford, the new headquarters for the king, where he was later kept under house arrest himself. Although he was to become Charles’s personal chaplain in his various confinements, including for a while his imprisonment at Carisbrooke Castle, the place to which Hammond longed to return was his parish at Penshurst: ‘the necessity to leave his flock … was that which did most affect him of any that he felt in his whole life’.

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It was a measure of the depth of ideological passions and the widespread effects of the political hostilities at the time that even such a naturally pacifist scholar as Henry Hammond, ministering to a country parish far away from the centres of political and ecclesiastical power, should have his daily life completely disrupted, his own life, even, threatened. He was never able to take up his living again at Penshurst but continued to write with all the fluency he had shown when young, sheltered by various friends and admirers, and enduring with unflagging patience the agony of kidney stones and gout that afflicted him in middle age. He died aged fifty-four of kidney failure in 1660, just as his old patron’s son was restored to the throne.

William’s father too suffered a reversal of fortune that reverberated in his son’s life. Sir John Temple had been a member of Charles I’s forces riding north in 1639 to confront the rebellious Scots. The following year he was rewarded with the position of Master of the Rolls in Ireland, one of the most senior appointments in the Irish chancery, and he left England to assume his responsibilities. His good fortune was not to last long, however, for in October 1641 he was in the thick of the Irish rebellion (or massacre as it was called by contemporaries). Deeply held resentments over the plantation policies of both James I and Charles I, encouraging Protestant settlers from England and Scotland, finally erupted in anarchic and bloody violence. The Irish Catholics joined forces with the equally disaffected Anglo-Norman ‘Old English’ aristocracy in an attempt to drive out the Protestants. Although the numbers killed are still open to dispute, there is little doubt that thousands of settlers were murdered, their farms burned, their families dispossessed. Rumour of inhuman atrocities spread like wildfire throughout England and Scotland, reviving fears of a popish conspiracy. With Charles’s situation so parlous at home, his cause was damaged further by the suspicions that he too was complicit in the conspiracy.

Sir John was undoubtedly appalled by the sights he witnessed and the stories he was told and had every reason to fear that this rebellion could turn into a St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, first against all Protestants but then drawing everyone in to a wholesale bloodbath. His anger towards the rebels was unassuaged, even as savage reprisals against them were carried out by the army. He was commended for his efficiency in ensuring that provisions got through to Dublin where the army was quartered but was obdurately against the official decision in 1643 to broker a deal with the rebels in order that Charles could withdraw his troops for use against the parliamentarian forces back in England. Sir John was suspended from his duties as punishment for this opposition and, along with three other privy counsellors, imprisoned in Dublin Castle for more than a year.