Читать книгу Read My Heart: Dorothy Osborne and Sir William Temple, A Love Story in the Age of Revolution - Jane Dunn - Страница 10

I felt this is the heart of England … history I felt; Cromwell; The Osbornes; Dorothy’s shepherdesses singing … the unconscious breathing of England

VIRGINIA WOOLF, watching a country wedding, Diary,

22 September 1928

DOROTHY’S DETERMINATION TO direct her own fate and modify her central role as dutiful daughter and marriage pawn was highly unusual for the time. The kind of family she was born into, and the possible influences and mythologies that were brought to bear on her while growing up a well-bred Stuart girl, contributed to her unique insistence on self-determination. The Osborne family for centuries had been part of the lifeblood of rural and administrative England. Dorothy Osborne was born in 1627, two years after Charles I had come to the throne. Her most recent ancestors on her father’s side were landed gentry and faithful officers of the crown, who, from the fifteenth century, were settled as landowners in Essex. But it was the women they married who brought a certain intellectual strength and unorthodox cast of mind to the genetic mix she inherited. Perhaps there was an extra helping of independence of mind in these women that could be expressed more openly by Dorothy, freed by the revolutionary chaos of the time.

Her great-grandfather Peter Osborne was born in 1521, when Henry VIII was in his prime, and subsequently became keeper of the privy purse to Henry’s son, Edward VI. He and his heirs were granted the hereditary office of treasurer’s remembrancer^* in the exchequer. He married Anne Blythe, the daughter of the first regius professor of physick at the University of Cambridge and niece of Sir John Cheke, the celebrated Greek scholar, regius professor of Greek and tutor to Edward VI.^† This venerable man died in Sir Peter’s house, shamed at having publicly recanted his Protestantism under Mary I. The intellectual Cheke descendants were important to Dorothy and were mentioned often in her letters where she referred to them as ‘cousins’, making a particular point of their kinship.

Peter and Anne’s son was Dorothy’s grandfather Sir John Osborne, born in 1552. He married Dorothy Barlee, ten years his junior and lady-in-waiting to Anne of Denmark, consort to James I. She was the heiress and granddaughter of the fearsome Richard Lord Rich, a brilliant, ruthlessly opportunistic lawyer who betrayed Sir Thomas More during Henry VIII’s reign and under Mary I was a zealous burner of heretics. Sir John Osborne inherited the office of treasurer’s remembrancer on his father’s death in 1592. It was he who acquired Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire, which remained the country seat of this branch of the family right into the twentieth century.

Sir John and Lady Osborne’s eldest son, another Sir Peter Osborne, was our Dorothy’s father. Born in 1585, the first of five sons, he went to Emmanuel College, Oxford, when he was eighteen. Dorothy’s uncle Francis, the youngest of her father’s brothers, was the only writer in her immediate family, publishing his hugely popular Advice to a Son in 1656. Although he was not a published writer himself, Sir Peter’s letters are remarkable for their candour and expressiveness, a family characteristic that his daughter in her own writing was to transform into art. The brothers grew up at Chicksands where their father had installed in the neighbouring rectory at Hawnes the radical Puritan preacher and writer, Thomas Brightman,^* whose influential preaching and writings were full of the sense of an imminent fulfilment of the apocalyptic prophesies of the Book of Revelations. Scholarly and saintly in appearance, he was passionately opposed to the established church and believed the Pope was the anti-Christ whose destruction was foretold by God.

The Osbornes at this time were members of a militant anti-establishment Church and Francis at least was educated at home, much of it in the challenging intellectual company of Brightman. When it came to choosing allegiances during the civil war, the eldest and evidently more conventional Peter fought doggedly and in vain for the royalists while the radicalised Francis chose to support parliament. It is interesting that Dorothy’s grandfather, a man so clearly sympathetic to an extreme wing of Puritanism, should have nurtured in his eldest son, Dorothy’s father, such resolute conservatism that he was prepared to sacrifice everything to support the king and maintain the status quo. These opposing family loyalties, complex and often painfully divisive as they were during this war, might have been one of the reasons for Francis’s rift with his family, mentioned in the preface to his book. There was also some dispute with his eldest brother over property that had to go to arbitration as Sir Peter lay dying.

Dorothy’s father was knighted in 1611 and he too held the family’s hereditary position in the treasury. His influential wife, Dorothy Danvers, and her family were responsible for changing his fortunes for ever. Her brother, the Earl of Danby, was created governor of Guernsey by Charles I in 1621 and at his instigation Sir Peter Osborne was made his lieutenant governor. In effect this meant that at the outbreak of civil war he would have to shoulder what turned out to be the thankless, prolonged and self-destructive ordeal of defending for the king Castle Cornet, the island’s principal fort.

Dorothy’s mother, Lady Osborne, was the youngest daughter of Sir John Danvers of Dauntsey in Wiltshire, whom John Aubrey^* described as ‘a most beautifull and good and even-tempered person’.¹ Sir John’s wife, Dorothy’s grandmother, was Elizabeth Danvers^† with whom he had nine children who survived to adulthood. She was an even more remarkable person, described by Aubrey as very beautiful, with some Italian blood, and clever too. Knowing Chaucer off by heart she was ‘A great Politician; great witt and spirit but revengefull: knew how to manage her estate as well as any man’,² with a jeweller’s knowledge and eye for gems and fine jewellery. She lived into her late seventies, if not her eighties, long enough to see her granddaughter Dorothy born. Women like her made no mark on the grand tide of history, leaving just a ripple in a family memoir or contemporary’s diary. Mothers and grandmothers were historically considered of note only in relation to their connections with others, and those usually male. Absent from the nation’s history, even in the stories of their families they seldom featured as individuals whose character and talents were worth memorialising, unless they took up the pen themselves. But their qualities lived on in their descendants.

Both Dorothy’s mother and grandmother came from more adventurous and spirited stock than the Osbornes’ solid pragmatic line. Daughters share not only the genetic inheritance of their brothers but, in early childhood at least, the family circumstances and ethos too. The sexes usually were separated later by expectations, education and opportunity, but the girls were just as much participants in the experiences of their childhood, the personalities that surrounded them and the animating spirit of the family. If brothers were educated at home then part of that education at least became accessible to any willing and able sister. The intellectual and personal qualities that distinguished the men, however, were more likely expressed in their sisters’ lives domestically and obliquely.

Dorothy’s mother had three remarkable brothers. She and her youngest sister Lady Gargrave might well have been remarkable too if they had been allowed to express themselves on a wider stage, the one becoming a resourceful melancholic and the other a forceful busybody. These three brothers all lived adventurous and boldly individual lives, all in the public eye, and suffered dramatically opposing fates. As uncles to Dorothy and brothers to her mother, their characters and experiences, and the family stories about them, were part of what made Dorothy Osborne’s own life and character what they were. She even, along with her family, spent some time living in the house of the youngest uncle in Chelsea in London.

Her eldest uncle, Sir Charles Danvers, was a soldier and man of action. Born in 1568 at the heart of Elizabeth I’s reign, he could have made a great career for himself in that world of swaggering and ambitious men. At barely twenty years old, he was knighted by his commander for courageous service in the Netherlands. Unfortunately he was later implicated in the murder, by his brother Henry, of a Wiltshire neighbour, and both had to flee as outlaws to France, where they came to the notice of the French king Henri IV, who, along with some Danvers sympathisers from their own country, petitioned Elizabeth I and William Cecil for a pardon. According to John Aubrey, also born in Wiltshire with a Danvers grandmother of his own, Lady Elizabeth Danvers, Dorothy’s formidable grandmother, having been widowed in her forties, then married Queen Elizabeth’s cousin Sir Edmund Carey,^* himself only ten years older than her eldest son, specifically to expedite her sons’ pardons.

When he eventually returned to England in 1598, Sir Charles’s gratitude and loyalty to the Earl of Southampton, who had come to his aid and offered him refuge after the murder, led him into the ill-fated Essex Plot against their queen. When this was discovered he admitted all and was beheaded for treason in 1601, still only in his early thirties. This happened two decades before Dorothy’s birth, but Sir Charles Danvers was the eldest son and heir and the stain of treason marked a family for generations, laying waste to their fortunes in the process.

Dorothy’s next uncle, Henry, the perpetrator of the original murder, was born in 1573. He was to be raised to great heights as the Earl of Danby and would die in 1644 ‘full of honours, wounds, and dais’ at the considerable age of seventy. He was already a middle-aged man when Dorothy was born. Like his elder brother he showed precocious military leadership and valour. He was commander of a company of infantry by the age of eighteen and knighted after the Siege of Rouen in 1591 when he was only nineteen. He was twenty-one when, involved in a neighbourly dispute, he fired the fatal shot that killed Henry Long and branded him a murderer. This scandal and resulting exile of both brothers devastated the family, and was the fatal blow for their gentle father. Aubrey wrote how he had been particularly affected, ‘his sonnes’ sad accident brake his heart’,³ and in fact Sir John died only two months later in 1594, without further contact with his eldest exiled sons, or any intimation of the adventures and celebrity that awaited them. Sir Henry’s outlawry was reversed eventually in 1604, but by then his father had been dead for ten years, his mother had married again and his elder brother Charles had died the ignominious death of a traitor.

More honours were heaped on Sir Henry Danvers’s head. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign he was made sergeant-major-general in Ireland, James I created him Baron Danvers of Dauntsey for his valiant service there and Charles I made him Earl of Danby in 1626. Aubrey described him as having ‘a magnificent and munificent Spirit’. He was tall and lean, ‘sedate and solid … a great Improver of his Estate, to eleaven thousand pounds per annum at the least, neer twelve.^* A great Oeconomist’.⁴ In 1621 he had been awarded the governorship of the Isle of Guernsey for life but when required to do something to defend the island appeared to find this honour rather less attractive and somewhat beneath his dignity: ‘[Danby] thinks it not for the king’s honour, nor suitable to his own reputation, that he, who was appointed general against anticipated foreign invaders in Ireland, should go to Guernsey to be shut up in a castle’.⁵ When civil war loomed, this poisoned chalice was passed to his brother-in-law, Dorothy’s father, Sir Peter Osborne, whose dogged loyalty to the king and defence of the said castle cost him his health, his fortune and possibly hastened the death of his wife.

Dorothy’s youngest Danvers uncle, Sir John, born in 1588, was perhaps the most individual of them all and the uncle she knew best. He had a strong aesthetic taste in houses and gardens and when Dorothy was a girl she and some of her family lodged for a time in his magnificent house in Chelsea. His influence on his young niece was likely to be lasting as he lived until she was in her late twenties. As a young man John Danvers’s beauty matched his singular discrimination in art and architecture. Aubrey recalled his good looks and charming nature: ‘He had in a faire Body an harmonicall Mind: In his Youth his Complexion was so exceedingly beautifull and fine, that … the People would come after him in the Street to admire Him. He had a very fine Fancy, which lay (chiefly) for Gardens, and Architecture.’⁶

So great was his interest and skill in gardening that Aubrey claimed the garden Sir John created for his house at Chelsea^† was the first to introduce Italianate style to London. Its beauty was legendary and it was this garden, full of harmony of scale and proportion, of scented plants and fruiting trees, that Dorothy would have known as a child. Sir John’s own sensual response to its delights was captured by the great biographer in this evocative vignette of how he scented his hat with herbs: ‘[he] was wont in fair mornings in the Summer to brush his Beaver-hatt on the Hyssop and Thyme, which did perfume it with its naturall spirit; and would last a morning or longer’.⁷ He leased a part of his land to the Society of Apothecaries and eventually they established the famous Chelsea Physic Garden there in 1673, one of the oldest botanical gardens in Europe.

When John Danvers was barely twenty he married Magdalen Herbert, the widow of Richard Herbert and mother of ten children, one of whom became the famous poet and divine, George Herbert.^* John was knighted by James I the following year in 1609. Two more marriages to heiresses followed but his extravagant tastes in interior decoration and horticultural grandeur resulted in mounting debts. He was a member of parliament and a gentleman of the privy chamber under Charles I. Always generous ‘to distressed and cashiered Cavaliers’, eventually his own debts caught up with him, making him reluctant to help finance the king’s expedition to Scotland in 1639. By the beginning of the civil war in 1642 he took up arms for parliament against the king. On Charles’s defeat he was one of the commissioners appointed to try the king and subsequently a signatory to the royal death warrant.

Dorothy’s Danvers uncles had had ‘traitor’ and ‘murderer’ attached to their names; now Sir John, to whom she had been closest, became notorious in history as Danvers the ‘regicide’.^† Given her father’s passionate and unquestioning support for Charles I, willing to give his fortune and even his life for him, it must have been difficult for Dorothy in this febrile time to reconcile a fond and admired uncle being so closely implicated in the murder of the king.

Katherine Danvers was Dorothy’s Aunt Gargrave, a formidable battleaxe in the family armoury who would be used against Dorothy in the intractable matter of her marriage. She herself had married a profligate husband, Sir Richard Gargrave, who had squandered his vast fortune in record time. This meant all her redoutable talents were put to work in squabbling with her family and the government over various properties she claimed as hers.

So it was that Dorothy grew up in a family of very mixed talents and fortunes. This continuity of domestic life included the legacy of ghosts and stories of the previous generations with their individual extremes of triumphs and sorrow. Born in 1627, most probably at Chicksands Priory, she was the youngest of ten children, two of whom had already died. Her eldest surviving sibling was her seventeen-year-old sister Elizabeth, who was yet to marry and have three daughters before dying aged thirty-two at the outbreak of the first civil war. The rest were all older brothers, the closest of whom was Robin, the brother who accompanied Dorothy to the Isle of Wight on their fateful visit in 1648. He was only one year older than Dorothy and they grew up closely bonded as the babies at the end of a large family.

It was unusual then for Dorothy, as the youngest of a large family, to have so many grandparents still living. Her Osborne grandfather died the year after she was born at the age of seventy-six, Sir John’s wife, another Dorothy Osborne, died at the same great age but when Dorothy was eleven and old enough to have memories of her. Her dashing maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Danvers, by this time Lady Carey, was even longer lived, dying in 1630 when Dorothy was three years old, but she remained a great personality in family lore.

Chicksands Priory was the Osbornes’ family home and already an ancient building full of history when they lived there. In the twelfth century, at the height of the religious fervour that drove the second crusade against the Muslims, the manor of Chicksands (there was a variety of spellings through the centuries) was donated by Countess Rose de Beauchamp and Baron Payne to the Gilbertine Order for the building of a religious house.^* Two cloisters, one for men and one for women, were constructed on the north bank of the River Flit near the village of Campton and the market town of Shefford. The troublesome priest Sir Thomas à Becket, when Archbishop of Canterbury and at odds with Henry II, was believed to have sought refuge at Chicksands Priory in 1164 before fleeing into temporary exile in France. After centuries of mixed fortunes but relative peace, the cataclysmic dissolution of the monasteries enacted under Henry VIII’s decree ended the religious life at Chicksands in 1538, some 388 years after the priory was first founded.

Once the resident monks and nuns had been dispersed the agricultural land was leased to farmers and the buildings and estate sold off: by the end of the sixteenth century the priory itself had fallen into serious disrepair. At the time Dorothy’s grandfather acquired the estate, the only remaining building that was suitable as a domestic dwelling was the ancient stone cloister built for the nuns. Along with the estate came legends of a series of secret escape tunnels and the ghost of a nun who had been walled up in a windowless room. Given its history, the existence of tunnels to lead religious personages to safety (or offer the inmates a means of escape back to the secular world) would seem perfectly reasonable, yet after generations of curious investigators have banged and tapped and excavated the property nothing has been found. However, the less likely tale of a cruelly sacrificed nun has been given more enduring life through the reporting – and probable exaggeration – across the centuries of various strange sightings and supernatural experiences. A false window on the east front of the priory added fuel to the over-heated speculations of the nun’s forbidden liaisons, scandalous pregnancy and a murdered lover in the priory’s murky past.^†

Certainly Dorothy and her family seemed to have nothing but affection for the place and the quiet and prosperous rural life that they lived there. However her father’s duties as lieutenant governor of Guernsey were to require long absences from home and in the end almost beggared the Osborne fortune. The first scare occurred in the period around Dorothy’s birth and infancy. At the beginning of 1626 England was at war with Spain and intelligence reports suggested the islands of Guernsey and Jersey were likely to be invaded. The attempted invasion of England by the Spanish Armada barely thirty-eight years before lingered in the memory and mythology of many, even those who were as yet unborn at the time. To make matters worse, France too seemed ready to strike at these vulnerable islands in response to the Duke of Buckingham’s failed attempt to aid the Protestants under siege at La Rochelle. By October 1627, Sir Peter Osborne was dispatched to Guernsey in charge of 200 men^* as reinforcements in the defence of Castle Cornet against possible French or Spanish adventuring.

Guernsey, along with all the Channel Islands, was of great strategic importance, sited as it was in the middle of a trade route and within striking distance of France: a contemporary scholar described them, ‘seated purposely for the command and empire of the ocean’.⁸ At a time when prosecutions for witchcraft on the English mainland were in decline, Guernsey was distinguished for its zealous persecution of witches and sorcerers and its more barbaric treatment of the accused. It seemed that being old, friendless and female carried an extra danger there: ‘if an ox or horse perhaps miscarry, they presently impute it to witchcraft, and the next old woman shall straight be hal’d to prison.’⁹ The minister of the established Presbyterian Church of Guernsey wrote of the cruelties practised on convicted witches in Normandy in an attempt to get them to confess: ‘the said judges … before the execution of the sentence, caused them to be put to the torture in a manner so cruel, that to some they have torn off limbs, and to others they have lighted fires on their living bodies.’¹⁰ Anglo-Norman in culture, Guernsey followed this approach rather than that of the more moderate English in their treatment of convicted witches. As the dungeons of Castle Cornet provided the only real jail on the island, Sir Peter Osborne would have become responsible for any poor wretch incarcerated there prior to eventual execution by hanging or burning.

The threat of war evaporated, however, soon after these extra troops had arrived and the townspeople, restive at having to support their living expenses, agitated to have them dismissed. They were ordered back to England by the beginning of 1629. Sir Peter Osborne may well have returned with them and travelled on to his estate in Bedfordshire, to spend some time with his family. His father had died and he had inherited the estate, and his youngest and last child, Dorothy, was by then in her second year.

Dorothy’s mother, along with the vast majority of women of her class, was unlikely to have breast-fed her children. The Puritan tendency was gaining moral force by the beginning of the seventeenth century and proselytised the benefits of maternal breast-feeding but the Osbornes of the time did not identify themselves either with such radical religious or political interests. For a woman like Dorothy’s mother to feed her own child was still such a rarity that it would have excited some kind of comment or record. She was much more likely to have paid another woman, already nursing her own baby, to do the job. However there were various progressive tracts advising that maternal breast-feeding helped make the mother and child bond stronger, re-enacted the Blessed Virgin’s relationship with Jesus, and safeguarded the child from imbibing the inferior morality of the wet nurse (a name first given to these practitioners in 1620).

Juan Luis Vives,^* the celebrated educationalist of the previous century, whose ideas influenced the education of both Mary I and Elizabeth I and extended well into the seventeenth century, looked to the animal kingdom to support his treatise that a mother who fed her own child built a stronger bond: ‘Who can say to what degree this experience [maternal breast-feeding] will engender and increase love in human beings when wild beasts, which are for the most part alien to any feelings of love for animals of a different species, love those who nourished and raised them and do not hesitate to face death to protect and defend them?’ He also feared for the effect on the child of suckling from a woman other than its own mother: ‘we are often astonished that the children of virtuous women do not resemble their parents, either physically or morally. It is not without reason that the fable, known even to children, arose that he who was nurtured with the milk of a sow has rolled in the mire.’¹¹

By Vives’s standards the woman who was chosen to feed the youngest Osborne must have had not only a talent for childcare, for Dorothy survived infancy,^* but also moral and intellectual qualities of some distinction. By the time her father returned from Guernsey, Dorothy would have been weaned and begun to take her place in the family. Despite the eight sons already born to her mother and father, it was still customary to deplore the birth of a girl. Give me sons and yet more sons was the usual cry from both men and women. Letters and journals of the time were full of fathers’ disappointments and mothers’ apologies for failing to provide the family with another boy. Lady Anne d’Ewes wrote to her absent husband, already the father of sons, making the best of their disappointment, ‘though we have failed in part of our hope by the birth of a daughter, yet we are freed from much care and fear a son would have brought.’¹²

Dorothy does not write directly of her early education but there was no doubt from her letters that she was wonderfully expressive in her own language and reasonably fluent in French. She had a sophisticated and unusually direct writing style that was highly valued by William Temple and his sister, and other contemporaries lucky enough to receive them. Dorothy was sharply intelligent and perceptive with a strong will and mischievous wit. A keen reader, she knew her classical authors, was particularly fond of Ovid, and devoured contemporary French novels of interminable length so enthusiastically that she even bothered to reread some of them in English, commenting unfavourably on the quality of the translations.

It is most likely that her education was mostly at home at Chicksands and then, with the political upheavals of civil war, possibly for a time in Guernsey with her father, and later in France. It was usual for a daughter in her position at the end of a big family and very close in age to the brother above her to be educated initially with him, sharing some lessons at least. In the case of the Osborne family, home education of the previous generation was conducted by the local curate, as was the case for their uncle Francis growing up at Chicksands some two decades earlier. A cynical man who felt he had not fulfilled his promise, he blamed his home education for his lack of skills necessary to progress in a self-serving world. School learning, on the other hand, he believed, would have instilled the duplicity and opportunism necessary for success.

Personal ambition and independence of mind were reckoned absolutely undesirable, even a sign of madness, in a girl growing up in the early seventeenth century. The remarkable flowering of English women’s education among the elite had been a temporary phenomenon of the mid-sixteenth century and was now over. For a while, Sir Thomas More’s famous statement, ‘I do not see why learning … may not equally agree with both sexes,’¹³ was put into triumphant practice by a number of noblewomen of the time. Elizabeth I and the daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke (who united their brilliance with the Cecil and Bacon families) were shining examples of this efflorescence. However, by the time Dorothy was a girl the rising tide of Puritanism stressed a more obedient and domestic role for women. Certainly daughters of the gentry were taught to read and write. Fluency in French was also considered a useful refinement for a lady. But equally important was learning the social arts of music, dancing, drawing and embroidery. There is lasting evidence that Dorothy excelled at the last, for a beautiful silk coverlet finely embroidered by her with a variety of animals and insects, birds and flowers still exists in her family’s keeping.

A contemporary of Dorothy’s, Anne, Lady Fanshawe, had a broadly similar structure to her life^* and described in her memoirs her early education in the country and frustration at learning the womanly arts when she longed to be living an active life: ‘[it] was with all the advantages that time afforded, both for working all sorts of fine works with my needle, and learning French, singing, lute, the virginals, and dancing; and, not withstanding I learned as well as most did, yet was I wild to that degree that the houres of my beloved recreation took up too much of my time, for I loved riding in the first place, and running, and all acteive pastimes; and in fine I was that which we graver people call a hoyting girle.’¹⁴

However, all these social graces were only the gloss on a seventeenth-century gentlewoman’s education, for at the heart of her moral and intellectual schooling was religion. This and a due respect for the authority of her parents was the structure by which she was expected to live her life. The mother of Margaret Lucas, who later as the Duchess of Newcastle^† became notorious for her lack of self-effacement, laid on tutors for her daughter in all the basic ladylike skills, but Margaret reckoned they were more for ‘formality than benefit’ and consequently ‘we were not kept strictly thereto, for my mother cared not so much for our dancing and fiddling, singing and prating of several languages, as that we should be bred virtuously, modestly, civilly, honourably, and on honest principles’.¹⁵

Another daughter of a royalist family, Lady Halkett, recalled the emphasis put on her religious education under the eye of an intellectual mother. Each day began and ended with prayer and devotional reading, usually of the Bible, and the local church was a regular meeting-place for worship and for instruction: ‘for many yeares together I was seldome or never absent from devine service att five a clocke in the morning in the summer and sixe a clock in winter.’¹⁶ This routine continued until the Puritan ascendancy during the commonwealth discouraged displays of public worship.

Religion played more a pragmatic than a spiritual role in the average young woman’s life by setting and enforcing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. It provided the moral framework to an individual life and the badge of identity for the extended family. As Sir George Savile^* explained to his daughter, her education very much in mind: ‘Religion is exalted reason, refined and sifted from the grosser parts of it … it is both the foundation and the crown of all virtues … It cleanseth the understanding, and brusheth off the earth that hangeth about our souls.’¹⁷ He also thought it better if young women remained loyal to the religion they were brought up in as it was ill-advised for a girl to trouble her head with religious debate, ‘in respect that the voluminous inquiries into the truth, by reading, are less expected from [your sex]’.¹⁸

Dorothy was brought up to be the ideal daughter with an unquestioning belief in God and acceptance of His will and, by extension, the authority and dictates of her family. Growing up just before the cataclysmic upheavals of the civil wars, she was the youngest child in a comfortably off patriarchal family. There was a well-ordered pattern to life and a narrow range of choices for her future. The quality and horizons of her adult life depended on two things above all else: the nature, status and financial means of the man she would marry; and her health, for few women escaped their destiny of multiple childbirth and untreatable diseases that could only be left to run their course.

The influential religious writer Jeremy Taylor,^* whom Dorothy considered her spiritual mentor, offered his tolerant and practical interpretation of the scriptures by which a young woman like her could choose to live a worthwhile and pious life: ‘Let the women of noble birth and great fortunes … nurse their children, look to the affairs of the house, visit poor cottages, and relieve their necessities, be courteous to the neighbourhood, learn in silence of their husbands or spiritual guides, read good books, pray often and speak little, and “learn to do good works for necessary uses”, for by that phrase St. Paul expresses the obligation of Christian women to good housewifery and charitable provisions for their family and neighbourhood.’¹⁹

Chicksands Priory housed not only the Osborne family but also their servants with whom they lived closely. The real wealth of the estate consisted in about 800 acres of arable land, a similar amount of pasture providing grazing for sheep and cattle. There was a similar acreage again of woodland, with all the essential resources that provided building and fencing materials, firewood, cover for game and protection from the wind and the worst of the weather. On top of this was a further acreage of uncultivated heathland. Chicksands estate also housed its tenant farmers and estate workers in some forty different houses. There were two water mills to grind the corn they harvested. Vegetables and fruit, meat, milk, flour, all would have been produced for the substantial community who relied on the Osborne family and their land for their livelihoods.

Before the civil wars and the depredations on his fortunes, together with the swingeing fines that followed, Sir Peter Osborne’s annual income was £4,000 a year, the equivalent today of just under half a million. Life was lived in the raw, the poor and sick alongside the well-off and hearty, the yeoman workers and tradesmen amid the leisured classes of gentry and aristocracy. On a country estate everything was on an intimate scale, the people living close to the earth and its seasons: deer were hunted, wild animals trapped and domestic beasts slaughtered and butchered on site; the mentally ill or retarded were absorbed in the family and the larger community; babies were born in equal travail and danger, be it in the big house or the hovel; people suffered and died at home while all around them life went on.

The Duchess of Newcastle, a contemporary of Dorothy’s, remembered being a sensitive child who shrank from the extremes of life and death that assailed her sensibilities on her parents’ estate in Essex. She refused to join the other ladies of quality who crowded round a hunted deer as it was killed ‘that they might wash their hands in the blood, supposing it will make them white’ and, unusually for her time, honoured the life in all creatures: ‘it troubles my conscience to kill a fly, and the groans of a dying beast strike my soul.’²⁰

Dorothy Osborne owned up to a similar liveliness of imagination and fellow feeling: ‘Nothing is soe great a Violence to mee, as that which moves my compasson[.] I can resist with Ease any sort of People but beggers. If this bee a fault in mee, tis at least a well natured one, and therefore I hope you will forgive it mee.’²¹ Growing up at Chicksands, Dorothy’s days had a rhythm and regularity dictated by the seasons and interrupted only by the visits of family and friends. Journeys were difficult and lengthy and young unmarried women could not undertake them on their own, so Dorothy usually had to wait until an obliging member of her large extended family could accompany her. In one of her later letters to William, Dorothy described in detail the pattern of her daily life. She happened to choose a June day in 1653 when she was twenty-six but, as she made clear, the pattern of rural life remained essentially unaltered through the years: it is reasonable to believe it was a sketch of many summer days at Chicksands when she was still a girl. It is this famous passage that Virginia Woolf recalled when she gazed on that country wedding in 1928.

You ask mee how I passe my time heer, I can give you a perfect accounte not only of what I doe for the present, but what I am likely to do this seven yeare if I only stay heer soe long. I rise in the morning reasonably Early, and before I am redy I goe rounde the house til I am weary of that, and then into the garden till it grows to[o] hott for mee. About ten a clock I think of making mee redy, and when that’s don I goe into my fathers Chamber, from thence to dinner, where my cousin [Henry] Molle and I sitt in great State, in a Roome & at a table that would hold a great many more. After dinner wee sit and talk till Mr B [Levinus Bennet, Sheriff of Cambridgeshire] com’s in question and then I am gon. The heat of the day is spent in reading or working [needlework] and about sixe or seven a Clock, I walke out into a Common that lyes hard by the house where a great many young wenches keep Sheep and Cow’s and sitt in the shade singing of Ballads; I goe to them and compare theire voices and Beauty’s to some Ancient Shepherdesses that I have read of and finde a vast difference there, but trust mee I think these are as innocent as those could bee. I talke to them and finde they want nothing to make them the happiest People in the world, but the Knoledge that they are soe. Most Comonly when wee are in the middest of our discourse one looks aboute her and spyes her Cow’s goeing into the Corne and then away they all run, as if they had wing’s at theire heels. I that am not soe nimble stay behinde, & when I see them driving home theire Cattle I think tis time for mee to retyre too. When I have supped I goe into the Garden and soe to the side of a small River that runs by it where I sitt downe and wish you with me.²²

Under the brilliance of this evocation of the centuries-old pattern of country life and the idyll of an English summer day lay a sense of personal frustration. While the herd girls were unaware, Dorothy believed, of the sublime simplicity of their lives she, the young unmarried daughter of the estate, was over-conscious of her own youth idled away while she waited on the will of others. She was richer, better educated and living in greater comfort than the girls minding the cattle, yet she had to look to marriage for purpose in her life and seemed in part to envy the useful and natural freedom of their days. Where she was solitary they had comradeship; where she was weighed down with her heavy seventeenth-century dress, its tight bodice and bulky petticoats and all the expectations laid upon a lady of quality, they were less encumbered, sprightly and carefree. In reality the lives of these country girls were hard and narrow, and winter would have made their labour much less enviable, but Dorothy’s reaction to their lively conversation and the simplicity of their working lives, making them ‘the happiest People in the world’, revealed the feeling that her own life lacked autonomy and purpose.

The civil war that began in 1642 only destroyed for a while this ordered rural life, but the Osbornes’ easy prosperity was gone for ever. The effects on the family were catastrophic but commonplace. Two of Dorothy’s brothers died in action fighting for the king; Henry, lieutenant colonel of foot, at the Battle of Naseby in 1645 when he was thirty-one and Charles, only seven years older than Dorothy, also lieutenant colonel of foot, was killed at Hartland in Devon the following year when he was twenty-six. The depredations went deep and wide: her father’s annual income was reduced by 90 per cent to £400 per annum;^* both parents were prematurely aged by the hazards and relentless strain of their circumstances, and Dorothy herself, temporarily at least, lost her belief in a benign world. But along with the destruction and suffering of war also came opportunity. Civil war particularly touched everyone and it affected Dorothy’s life as deeply as any. Most significantly, it interrupted the rural seclusion of her life, introducing her to new and at times alarming experiences, and it disrupted the marriage dance choreographed for her by the wider family.

Dorothy’s early life had been lived against the uncertain backdrop of Charles I’s personal rule. After his relationship with a succession of parliaments had broken down over intractable financial, political and religious issues, the king had dismissed his 1629 parliament with little intention of meeting them again. He became increasingly isolated from his own people who were suspicious that his private relationships, with his Catholic wife Henrietta Maria and reckless favourite Buckingham, until his assassination in 1629, exerted a sinister influence on his public policies. After what was called the ‘Eleven Years’ Tyranny’, Charles was forced to recall parliament in 1640 and agree to a raft of concessions, limiting his power and redressing some of the grievances against him. These agreements he subsequently ignored. Having lost the trust of a thoroughly disenchanted parliament, the king withdrew from Westminster and in the summer of 1642 raised his standard at Nottingham, marking the formal start of civil war.

Dorothy was fifteen when the country’s gentry and nobility were forced to choose between their king or their elected parliament. This choice could be a matter of life and death, placing their fortunes, their lives and the lives of their retainers at the disposal of their masters at war. There was no doubt that Dorothy’s father was one of the king’s men. Her immediate family seems to have been solidly royalist, with four brothers at least available to serve their king, two of whom were sacrificed in the process.

So it was that loyal Sir Peter Osborne was called upon once more to defend Castle Cornet, the only royalist stronghold in Guernsey, an independent-minded island long attached to its Presbyterianism, which had declared quickly for parliament. By comparison, its larger neighbour, Jersey, remained royalist largely due to the pervasive influence of the all-powerful Carteret family. Lieutenant governor of the island at the time was Captain Carteret, later Sir George Carteret, who was a man of outstanding courage and capability as a naval commander but also acquisitive and ambitious for himself. He had freedom of movement and action while Sir Peter stoically endured real privation in his attempt to hold Castle Cornet against a hostile populace. Carteret’s opportunism and Sir Peter’s incorruptible and ingenuous nature, together with his reliance on Carteret for much of the provisions needed by his garrison, meant conflict between the two governors was inevitable.

When Sir Peter Osborne returned to Guernsey in 1642 the inhabitants were already ill-disposed towards him. They had long memories of the unwelcome garrison he had brought over during the fear of invasion in 1627 and imposed on them for two years. There was natural antipathy anyway towards the mainland and previous governors who had looked to help themselves to the lion’s share of island revenues. The inhabitants’ independence was also fostered by the republican sensibilities of many of their clergy, some of whom were French Calvinists escaping from the cruel persecutions of their own king. Although there were no hostilities at first, from the beginning of the civil war Sir Peter seems to have lived in the castle almost entirely separate from the townspeople and islanders. This they resented, eventually listing their complaints against him the following year in a letter to the Earl of Warwick, whom Cromwell had appointed as governor of Jersey and Guernsey. The gist of these complaints was Osborne’s aloofness from the islanders and his misuse of the king’s grants by building promenades and genteel accommodation within the castle rather than bolstering its fortifications and providing extra billets for the soldiers.

By the spring of 1643, parliament had issued instructions to the newly appointed commissioners in Guernsey to seize Sir Peter Osborne and convey him back to them to answer for his disobedience and various other misdemeanours. When the commissioners attempted to fulfil this order, Sir Peter refused all compromise and threatened to destroy the town, firing several cannon shots over it and even some into it, terrifying the inhabitants. He was defiant, truly believing that no human agency could challenge King Charles’s right to rule the British Isles, and determined to expend whatever blood or fortune it took in defending his particular belief through the agency of his governorship of this one fort in a very small island. Sir Peter Osborne’s answer to the parliamentarian governor of the islands was morally clear, eloquent and quintessential of old royalist sentiment:

these islands being no ways subordinate to other jurisdiction, but to his majesty alone, as part of his most ancient patrimony enjoyed by those princes, his glorious predecessors, before that, by claim or conquest, they came to have interest in the crown of England, – no summons, by virtue of what power soever, hath command here, nor can make me deliver it up to any but to him by whom I am trusted, and to whom I am sworn, that have never yet made oath but only to the king. And God, I hope, whose great name I have sworn by, will never so much forsake me but I shall keep that resolution (by yourself misnamed obstinacy) to maintain unto my sovereign that faith inviolate unto my last.²³

In a time of conflict and upheaval many decisions of allegiance were made out of opportunism or self-preservation, but there were just as many men and women who stood by their passionately held principles and suffered the consequences. This statement of resolve epitomised the conservative loyalty and unshowy courage of the idealised cavalier spirit. Sir Peter did not just mouth ringing sentiments, he intended to live by them. He stockpiled what ammunition and provisions he could in preparation for a long siege. He attempted to instil a military discipline in his garrison by threatening draconian punishments for any insubordination. A brawling soldier would have his right hand chopped off, and a similar punishment would be meted out to anyone who merely threatened to punch an officer: whosoever actually struck his superior ‘shall be shot to death’.²⁴

Although Sir Peter maintained his royalist stronghold, parliament deposed the island’s royalist bailiff and dissolved the royal court, placing the government of Guernsey in the hands of twelve commissioners. The exploits of three of these, Careye, de Beauvoir and de Havilland, became the stuff of legend when in October 1643 they were captured through trickery and brought to Castle Cornet as prisoners, only to effect a miraculous escape some six weeks later and within hours of being hanged. Careye’s memoir is interesting in evoking the high state of tension between the island and its governor, the daily alarms and dangers that the garrison and islanders endured, the shortage of food,^* the hunger for news from the mainland. He also mentioned that Sir Peter had both his sons with him in late October when the commissioners were first brought into the castle as prisoners.

The news of the war that filtered back to Sir Peter in his isolated keep at first looked hopeful for the royalist cause. By the end of 1644 a loyal optimist could consider Charles had gained the upper hand and was well placed to take London. The following February, however, saw the establishment of parliament’s New Model Army and by early summer the royalist momentum was slammed into reverse. The new army’s comprehensive defeat of Charles I and Prince Rupert in the Battle of Naseby in June 1645 marked the beginning of the end for the king.

In the face of the debacle on the mainland, Sir Peter Osborne’s struggle to hold Castle Cornet was low on the list of royalist priorities and the defence of the strategic fort for the king was largely financed by his own resources. He set his family to work raising extra funds against his own property in support of the crown’s interest. Dorothy’s mother had already been employed in support of her embattled husband. By the beginning of 1643 Lady Osborne had travelled from Chicksands to Jersey to try to negotiate support from Sir George Carteret. This involved raising bonds against the Osborne estate to pay for any provisions that might be forthcoming.

The period of the civil war propelled women from the domestic sphere into political activity, even war, providing many opportunities to exhibit their courage and executive abilities while their men were away fighting or already dead. Stories were commonplace of remarkable women who resisted the opposing armies’ sieges of their houses and castles, one of the most notable being the royalist Countess of Derby who, refusing safe conduct from Latham House in Lancashire, withstood a three-month siege there in 1644, only surrendering the house at the end of the following year when the royalist cause was all but lost. However she then, with her husband, held Castle Rushen on the Isle of Man for the king. Again, with the earl away fighting in England, she attempted to withstand parliamentary forces, eventually having the distinction of being probably the last person in the three kingdoms to submit to the victorious parliament in October 1651.

The defence of Castle Cornet and the attempt to deliver practical assistance to the besieged lieutenant governor involved all Sir Peter Osborne’s immediate family. His letters mention his sons John, Henry and Charles who were variously visiting the castle, supporting the garrison, organising funds and provisions and running messages to the king or his followers. His wife, and on some occasions certainly Dorothy herself, were frantically pawning the family’s silver and begging for gifts and loans to finance Sir Peter’s defence. Dorothy suggested that her recoil from being pitied and the more melancholy aspects of her nature dated from this time of fear, uncertainty and danger. In the summer of 1645 Dorothy’s father sent word to their mother, via her brother John, that since her departure he and his men had had no more to eat than one biscuit a day and porridge at night, but he was adamant that any supporters of parliament, should they ask, were to be told instead that everyone at Castle Cornet was well and sufficiently supplied. Sir Peter was sixty when he wrote this, an old man by the standards of the time, and yet he suffered the daily strain and deprivation of this lengthy siege, largely unsupported by the monarch for whose cause he was sacrificing fortune, life and family.

Dorothy’s endurance of these betrayals and humiliations along with her mother taught her some baleful lessons. She described her sense of injustice, her fear that fleeting glimpses of happiness were easily crushed by a disproportionate weight of misfortune, that each flicker of hope revived the spirits only to have them dashed again, leaving her resigned to the dreariness of life:

This world is composed of nothing but contrariety’s and sudden accidents, only the proportions are not at all Equall for to a great measure of trouble it allow’s soe small a quantitye of Joy that one may see tis merely intended to keep us alive withal … I think I may (without vanity) say that nobody is more sencible of the least good fortune nor murmur’s lesse at any ill then I doe, since I owe it merely to custome and not to any constancy in my humor or something that is better; noe in Earnest any thing of good com’s to mee like the sun to the inhabitants of Groenland [Greenland] it raises them to life when they see it and when they misse it it is not strange they Expect a night half a yeer long.²⁵

Parliament was keen to persuade Sir Peter Osborne to surrender Castle Cornet and after only a year of siege had offered to return his confiscated estates to him. Liberty for himself and his garrison with the freedom to return to England to take up their lives and property with impunity was the generous and tempting offer. He was threatened that, should he refuse, such favourable terms would never be offered again: his estates would be sold and lost to him for ever. Gallantly, pig-headedly even, the old cavalier pursued his Quixotic destiny: ‘Gentlemen – Far be from me that mean condition to forfeit my reputation to save an estate that, were it much more than it is not, would be of too light consideration to come in balance with my fidelity, and in a cause so honourable, where there is no shame in becoming poor, or hazard in meeting death.’²⁶

Despite the fundraising activities of Lady Osborne and her children in St Malo, the family could not single-handedly support Castle Cornet and conditions for everyone continued to deteriorate. Dorothy and her mother were virtually homeless; three of her brothers were away engaged in various military and administrative duties on behalf of the king. Impoverished and anxious for the safety and health of their father, they could only imagine how he was enduring his lonely siege. By the end of 1644, facing winter, he wrote apologetically to King Charles pointing out that he had exhausted his own resources, had lost his estate and he and his men were facing starvation and forced surrender unless provisions were rapidly sent to the castle. He regretted mentioning the loss of his estate to his monarch, he said, but as he had exhausted all his resources he explained it was necessary to be so blunt, ‘only to make it appear in what need I stand of further help, having nothing left to serve your majesty with, but with my life, which likewise upon all occasion I shall, by the grace of God, be most ready to lay down’.²⁷ Two boats were dispatched from Jersey but the Guernseymen, aware that the castle was running out of food and fuel and soon would be forced to surrender, manned the artillery on the coast and sent out armed men in boats to try to intercept the supplies. Cannon were fired and a sporadic battle ensued but on this occasion the boats got through, the provisions were unloaded and the castle could hold out for a few months more.

By now the relations between Sir George Carteret in Jersey and Sir Peter Osborne on lonely watch in Guernsey had broken down completely. They were both royalist governors struggling against the political tide, short of supplies and support. However Carteret had freedom of movement and islanders who themselves had remained loyal. Although he attempted and sometimes succeeded in getting provisions through to the besieged castle on the neighbouring island, Carteret was more interested in looking after his own political and financial interests. There was a general belief that he grew rich during these troubled times on the cargoes of intercepted ships and the proceeds of piracy, so much so that it was estimated that he increased his family’s fortune by about £60,000 – a fortune of more than £7 million by modern standards. With both men engaged in the same cause, the rewards available to the opportunistic Carteret contrasted bleakly with the destruction of the Osborne fortunes. Carteret meanwhile had grown tired of Sir Peter’s complaints and continual requests for food and fuel when his own community needed all that was available. More seriously, he had grown suspicious of the activities of the whole Osborne family who, disenchanted, were increasingly acting independently of him. Osborne himself had realised he could not rely on Carteret, and his family subsequently looked further afield in their search for support.

In the bitter February of 1645 with the castle down to its last week’s bread rations, Dorothy’s aunt, Lady Gargrave, set out for St Malo with some of Sir Peter’s clothes and a couple of trunks of the family’s linen to try to pawn or sell in order to purchase provisions. Within six days this doughty woman set sail on her return journey to Jersey with a boat full of supplies but was chased by pirates ‘and narrowly escaped by running with great danger among the rocks’. So alarmed was she by the prevalence and zeal of the pirates in the area, she asked Sir George Carteret to loan her one of his experienced seamen to help ensure a safe delivery of the provisions to Castle Cornet. This he apparently refused her. Instead, he wrote a letter to one of Charles I’s advisers suggesting the Osborne family were guilty of double-dealing. More shockingly, he accused them of possible betrayal of the king’s cause by citing various activities of Lady Osborne and her sister.

This brought forth a cry of eloquent outrage from Sir Peter against ‘these maliciously invented slanders’. He explained how his wife’s tireless efforts of fundraising had exhausted her: ‘For when her mony was spent, and plate sold, she made no difficultie among strangers to ingage her self in a great debt for the releife of this castle, till her credit at last fayled.’ What provisions Lady Osborne then obtained were left to rot in Jersey due, it seemed, to Sir George Carteret’s inertia, or worse. This frustration of her Herculean efforts seemed to be the last straw for his long-suffering wife: ‘oppressed with trouble and greife, she fell into a desperate sicknes, that her self, and all those about her, feared her life’.²⁸

It was possible that her eighteen-year-old daughter Dorothy was with her during this ordeal for, barely conscious, Lady Osborne was carefully embarked on a Dutch ship and accompanied back to England, a journey of two days of which she hardly noticed the passing. Dorothy was to write later of the harsh experiences she had endured in France and the lowering effect they had had on her spirit and demeanour, so much so that her friends on her return hardly recognised her: ‘When I cam out of France nobody knew mee againe … and that Country which usualy gives People a Jollynesse and Gayete that is natural to the Climate, has wrought in mee soe contreary effects that I was as new a thing to them as my Cloth[e]s.’²⁹

The whole Osborne family was transformed very much for the worse by their experiences of war. Sir Peter Osborne had entered into his costly defence of Castle Cornet in 1642 when he was already fifty-seven years old, elderly by seventeenth-century standards. He was over sixty and exhausted in spirit, health and fortune when he eventually relinquished his post in the early summer of 1646. Lady Osborne’s pleas had some effect at last, although it was months before King Charles got round to writing about her husband’s plight to his queen Henrietta Maria, in exile in France. Uxurious and suppliant, the king asked his wife to release Sir Peter Osborne with the following letter dated 21 September 1646:

Dear Heart … I have but one thing more to trouble you with, it is, that I have received lately a letter from my Lady Osbourne, which tells me that her husband, who is governor of Guernsey, is in much want and extremity, but yet without my leave will not yield up his government; wherefore she hath earnestly desired me either to shew him some hopes of relief, or give him leave to make his own conditions. To this I have answered, that I would (as I do) recommend his relief heartily to thee, commanding her to direct her husband to observe the queen’s orders. So praying God to bless thee, and longing to hear from thee, I rest eternally thine,

Charles R³⁰

Sir Peter’s long and uncomfortable defiance at Castle Cornet was also a completely wasted effort with nothing good to come from it but the demonstration of his own uncompromised loyalty. There was no hope of reward or recompense and scant recognition. In October 1647 when Sir Peter had requested through his son that the king relay to him his commands, the reply came back: ‘I can give no commands, for I am now commanded; but when I shall be in any condition to employ his loyal affections, he shall know that he is a person I have a very particular regard to; commend me to him, and tell him I am beholding to him.’³¹ The king’s son Prince Charles had also vaguely promised some favour on a future occasion, possibly while he spent the summer months of 1646 in pleasant exile in Jersey, but Sir Peter died before his restoration as king in 1660. At that point, however, the newly enthroned Charles II had more pressing affairs to attend to. The diarist John Evelyn wrote an appreciation of him in which he recalled the shameful neglect of many hundreds of quiet heroes like Sir Peter Osborne, uncomplaining and unsung, while Charles II indulged his rapacious lovers and favourites: ‘An excellent prince doubtlesse had he ben lesse addicted to Women, which made him uneasy & allways in Want to supply their unmeasurable profusion, & to the detriment of many indigent persons who had signaly serv’d both him & his father.’³²

The father Dorothy greeted at St Malo after he had sailed away from Guernsey for ever was much diminished. His health was broken, his estate confiscated, his fortune beggared. His loyal wife’s own health and peace of mind had suffered too, his daughter Dorothy had lost her hopes and his family of brave sons was reduced by two, the promise of their youth and the pride of his old age destroyed in the random violence of war. The Osbornes’ plight was by no means unique but it would affect them all profoundly. Above all it made it imperative that their last daughter to marry should make an alliance with a man of property and conventional prospects to help restore the family’s status and fortune.

* An officer of the exchequer responsible for collecting debts due to the crown, the term probably dating from a time when these transactions were remembered rather than written down.

† Milton was some twenty years older than Dorothy Osborne and published his great works during her lifetime. In Sonnet XI he honoured the scholar: ‘Thy age, like ours, O Soul of Sir John Cheek/Hated not learning worse than toad or asp/When thou taught’st at Cambridge, and King Edward, Greek.’

* Thomas Brightman (1556–1607) had a great influence on the Puritan movement in England. Educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge, he was a modest man, a fine scholar and a fiery preacher. Brightman chose to remain unmarried, ‘preferring a bed unfilled to a bed undefiled’ and died suddenly, as he had wanted, on a summer’s day and in the company of his benefactor Sir John Osborne while they were bowling along in the latter’s carriage.

* John Aubrey (1626–97), antiquarian and writer best known for his brilliant extempore biographical sketches collected as Brief Lives and his recognition of the importance of Avebury and mapping of the prehistoric stones, which he showed to Charles II in 1663, the same year he became a member of the Royal Society. His wide friendships, warmth, curiosity and charm made his writing uniquely informative and entertaining.

† Lady Osborne was Elizabeth Nevill, daughter of John Nevill, 4th Lord Latymer. Born before 1552, she died in 1630, thirty-six years after her first husband Sir John Danvers.

* Sir Edmund Carey (1558–1637), son of Elizabeth I’s cousin (some said her half-brother) Henry Carey. Once married to Elizabeth Danvers he worked vigorously and unscrupulously to attempt to save the Danvers estates from the crown. They had been confiscated when Lady Danvers’s son and heir, Sir Charles, admitted his involvement with the Essex Plot and was declared a traitor.

* As this was the equivalent today of more than £1.25 million per annum it becomes obvious why his stepfather Sir Edmund Carey worked so assiduously to try to save this estate from the crown when Sir Charles Danvers died a traitor. Lord Danby gave Oxford some of his land in 1621 to create the first ‘physick garden’ in the country with the stated purpose ‘to promote learning and glorify the works of God’.

† This house next to the river at Chelsea was called Danvers House and adjoined what used to be Sir Thomas More’s mansion, known in the seventeenth century as Beaufort House. In 1696 Danvers House was pulled down to make way for Danvers Street. This runs now from Paultons Square to Cheyne Walk, parallel with Beaufort Street: only the names of these great houses remain.

* Although his brother was mortified by this marriage and the gossips wondered how such an eligible young man had chosen a woman more than twice his age, making him a stepfather of ten, it was reputably a happy union that lasted until Magdalen’s death in 1627. Aubrey did not share the world’s surprise, pointing out that the gorgeous youth had married Lady Herbert ‘for love of her Witt’. Magdalen Herbert was one of the lucky ones. Her life and character were celebrated in print by both her brilliant son George Herbert and her friend, the matchless poet and preacher John Donne.

† However, Sir John Danvers died at his house in Chelsea in 1655, without the disgrace that would come with the restoration of Charles II, and was buried in the family church at Dauntsey in Wiltshire. Five years later, with a king on the throne again, his name was added to the Act of Attainder as an enemy of the state.

* Gilbert, who became St Gilbert, was still alive in the middle of the twelfth century, a Lincolnshire lad born to wealthy Norman parents who set up in all thirteen religious communities. The Gilbertine Order remained the only truly English monastic order.

† Chicksands was sold to the Crown Commissioners in 1936. In 1939 it was leased to the Air Ministry and was known as RAF Chicksands. The USAF were tenants from 1950–95 when some American servicemen collected the incidents of the ghost in the night for a booklet, entitled Legend and Lore of Chicksands Priory.

* The weekly charge to the exchequer of £59 1s 10d for this enterprise was broken down thus: 16s a day to the governor; 4s a day for the lieutenant; 2s 6d a day for the ensign; four sergeants, 12d a day each; four drummers, 12d a day each; two surgeons, 12d a day each; two gunners, 12d a day each; one clerk, 12d a day; 200 men, 8d a day each. The feeding of the men however fell on the townspeople of St Peter Port.

* The first English translation of his The Education of a Christian Woman, a handbook on the education and conduct of girls and women, commissioned by Henry VIII’s Queen Catherine, was launched from the household of Sir Thomas More. It was published in 1528–9 and, immediately successful in England, went through at least nine editions in sixty years.

* It is hard to get accurate mortality rates for infants at the time, but Stone, in The Family, Sex and Marriage, conjectures that up to one-third of all babies died before they were one year old.

* Anne Harrison (1625–80) married the royalist Sir Richard Fanshawe, who became secretary to Charles II in exile. Her life was full of adventures and reversals of fortune. She had six sons and eight daughters but all but one son and four daughters predeceased Sir Richard, who died of a fever in 1666. Like Dorothy Osborne, Lady Fanshawe was consort to a diplomat on missions abroad during Charles II’s restoration. Dorothy went with her husband to the Netherlands, Anne to Portugal and then Spain.

† Margaret Lucas (1623–74), as maid of honour to Charles I’s Queen Henrietta Maria, followed her into exile in Paris and there met and married William Cavendish. She became the Duchess of Newcastle and, in publishing twenty-three books, the most prolific woman writer that the world had yet seen. She was unconventional, spasmodically brilliant and engaging, apologising for her presumption as a mere woman in daring to seek a commercial readership and fame.

* George Savile (1633–95), 1st Marquis of Halifax, writer, moderate politician and friend of William and Dorothy; after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 he was chosen to offer the crown to William and Mary II.

* Jeremy Taylor (1613–67), born in Cambridge and educated at the university there and at Oxford All Souls. He was a chaplain to Charles I and was arrested in 1645 during the first civil war. He retired to Wales until the restoration and wrote most of his highly successful books at this time. Two of the most famous, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650) and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651), were practical and spiritual manuals written with a direct simplicity and grandeur of spirit. Hazlitt wrote: ‘When the name of Jeremy Taylor is no longer remembered with reverence, genius will have become a mockery and virtue an empty shade.’ Taylor became Bishop of Down and Connor and later of Dromore in Ireland where he died.

* This was the equivalent of about £49,000 today.

* Careye obsessively noted their meagre and putrid rations: ‘peas which were sprouting and rancid bacon’; ‘cheese boiled with stinking grease, beer and bread as usual’. The water supply for the castle was contaminated when a cannon ball destroyed part of the storage cistern and there was not enough to drink. After the prisoners’ beer rations were stopped the lack of drinking water and the saltiness of the preserved food meant they began to suffer serious effects of dehydration. There is little reason to think that the governor and garrison were much better victualled.