Читать книгу Read My Heart: Dorothy Osborne and Sir William Temple, A Love Story in the Age of Revolution - Jane Dunn - Страница 11

When I was young and in some idle company, it was proposed that every one should tell what their three wishes should be, if they were sure to be granted: some were very pleasant, and some very extravagant; mine were health, and peace, and fair weather

WILLIAM TEMPLE, essay, ‘Of Health and Long Life’

WILLIAM TEMPLE WAS born into a family of clever and robust country gentlemen who showed an independence of mind and political fleetness of foot in navigating the quicksand of allegiances during the middle of the seventeenth century. Not for them the self-sacrifice and dogged certainties of a Sir Peter Osborne. More intellectually curious perhaps, more pragmatic than idealistic, they served both king and parliament, and managed to promote their careers despite the reversals of civil war, establishment of a new republic and restoration of a king.

William’s nephew Henry Temple, 1st viscount Palmerston, believed that the family was descended from the eleventh century magnate Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and Lady Godiva who, tradition had it, rode naked through Coventry to force her husband to revoke his oppressive taxation. More certain, and closer in time, was that William’s grandfather, after whom he was named, was the Sir William Temple who became provost of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1609. He was born in 1555 in a time of turmoil and suspicion at the end of Mary Tudor’s reign. The younger son of a younger son, he had to earn his own living. He flowered with the Elizabethan age and was a close friend and then secretary to the soldier poet Sir Philip Sidney.^* When both were in their early thirties, he followed Sidney to the Netherlands when he was made governor of Flushing: family lore had it that Sir William then held Sidney in his arms as he died of infection from a war wound in 1586.

From being the intimate of one young Orpheus, Temple now allied himself with an Icarus. He became secretary to Elizabeth I’s ambitious favourite the Earl of Essex.^† When Essex was executed in 1601 for plotting against the queen, Temple temporarily lost favour but Elizabeth had only two more years to live. He had spent almost a whole lifetime as an Elizabethan, but was to survive through two more kings’ reigns. His post as provost of Trinity was awarded under James I, as was his knighthood in 1622; he then died in 1627, the year of Dorothy’s birth and two years into the reign of Charles I.

Sir William’s intellectual and independent qualities of mind had been a large part of his attraction to Sir Philip Sidney. Educated at Eton, Temple had won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where he quickly showed an aptitude for philosophical debate. Controversially he there became a passionate advocate of the philosopher Ramus^‡ against the then orthodoxy of medieval scholasticism, with its highly convoluted definitions and terminology. Ramus had made a widely influential case for clarity, distinctness and analysis of all kinds, a systematisation of knowledge which turned out to be much easier to carry through in the new print culture. Temple’s annotated edition of Ramus’s Dialectics, arguing for a simplified system of logic, was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. It had the distinction of probably being the first book published by the Cambridge University Press in 1584. According to his granddaughter, William’s sister Martha, this was ‘writ … as I have bin told in the most elegant Latin any body has bin Master off’.¹

Sir William became provost of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1609 and was active in transforming the college and university so that it more resembled Cambridge. He was a lively presence around Dublin and was elected to the Irish House of Commons in 1613 as a member for the university. He was knighted rather late in his career and died five years later aged seventy-two and still in office. He had died in harness, although his resignation had already been mooted owing to ‘his age and weakness’.² His granddaughter noted that he died as he had lived, with a certain blitheness and a concern with learning, ‘with little care or thought of his fortune’,³ and so had only a modest estate to pass on to his heir.

Sir William Temple’s elder son, Sir John Temple, was our William’s father. The family’s friendship with the family of the Earl of Essex continued through the next two generations. Sir John too had a distinguished career, as member of both the Irish and English parliaments and, most significantly, as Master of the Rolls^* in Ireland. Born there in 1600, his life and fortune were to be very much bound up with that country. In the service of Charles I he was knighted in 1628. The next ten years were spent in a very happy marriage to Mary Hammond with the subsequent birth of seven children, five of whom survived infancy. The tragic death of his wife in September 1638, nine days after their twins were born, was a heavy blow to Sir John. Leaving his children with family in England, he returned to Ireland by the beginning of 1640 to take up his position as Master of the Rolls. At the beginning of the civil wars, he was forty-two years old and had just been elected a member of parliament for County Meath.

Although his efforts on behalf of the crown against the Irish rebels in 1641 had been much appreciated by the king, in the ideological conflicts his sympathies increasingly lay with the parliamentarians. He became one of the minor members of an influential cabal of disaffected aristocrats, called the ‘Junto’, concerned enough with the king’s growing autocracy to plot his downfall.^* In the summer of 1643 Sir John was imprisoned on Charles I’s orders, having been charged with writing two scandalous letters suggesting the king supported the Catholic rebels. He remained in close confinement for a year.

Sir John was eventually released and returned to his family in England, rewarded for what was considered unnecessarily harsh treatment with a seat in the English parliament in 1646. That year he published the book, probably partly written during his imprisonment, for which he would become famous: Irish rebellion; or an history of the beginning and first progresse of the generall rebellion … Together with the barbarous cruelties and bloody massacres which ensued thereon. This was a powerful partisan account of the rebellion, given emotive force by gruesome eyewitness reports and sworn statements. It caused an immediate sensation on publication, fomenting anger in England against the Irish and outrage back in Ireland. Its effects lived on over the centuries. It was used in part justification of Cromwell’s subsequent violent suppression of the Irish and decades later, in 1689, the Irish parliament ordered that it be burned by the common hangman. Ulster Protestants to this day still call on the powerful accounts of Irish atrocities in its pages to fuel their own partisan feeling.

In the summer of 1655 Sir John returned to Ireland, highly commended by Cromwell, to take up his old job of Master of the Rolls, a position that was reconfirmed after Charles II’s restoration. He was also awarded leases on various estates, specifically in the area round Carlow, amounting to nearly 1,500 acres of prime farmland, and Dublin, including 144 acres of what was to become Dublin’s famous Phoenix Park. Having managed skilfully to ride both parliament’s and the king’s horses, Sir John Temple lived a full and productive life: unlike Sir Peter Osborne, he managed to evade paying a swingeing price for his allegiances. However, dying in 1677 at a good age, he ended his days an old and successful, but not particularly rich, man. He had always hoped that his eldest son would not do as he and his father had done, but would establish the family finances securely by marrying a woman of property. Instead he had lived to see his beloved son and heir turn his back on repairing the Temple family fortune to repeat the pattern of his forefathers, in this respect at least, and follow his heart.

Sir John Temple had married a woman with an eminent intellectual lineage from the professional rather than the landed classes. Mary Hammond was the daughter of James I’s physician, John Hammond, and the granddaughter of the zealous Elizabethan lawyer the senior John Hammond who was involved with the interrogation under torture of a number of Catholic priests, including the scholar and Jesuit Edmund Campion. Mary was the sister of Dr Henry Hammond, one of the great teachers and divines of his age who became a highly regarded chaplain to Charles I and whose sweetness of disposition endeared him to everyone.

While this branch of the family dedicated itself to saving the royal body and ministering to his soul, another brother Thomas and a nephew Robert were in just as close proximity to the king but actively engaged in supporting his enemies. Thomas Hammond sat as a judge at Charles I’s trial and Colonel Robert Hammond, having distinguished himself fighting for parliament during the first civil war, ended up as governor of the Isle of Wight and, albeit reluctant, jailer of the king. This was one of the many families where passionately held convictions, translated into civil war, split brother from brother, mother from son.

The Temples and the Hammonds were not aristocratic families but both excelled as successful administrators and scholars. What qualities of intelligence and energetic pragmatism they had were united in the children of Sir John and Lady Temple. Into the mix went a high degree of physical attractiveness and charm, for the Hammond genes produced their mother Mary, known as a beauty, and their uncle Henry, whose good looks were remarked on even by his colleagues, along with his inner grace: ‘especially in his youth, he had the esteem of a very beauteous person’.⁴

Within ten months of the marriage, Mary fulfilled every expectation of a young wife and produced her first child, the precious son and heir. William Temple was born on 25 April 1628. His father had just been knighted and the family’s fortunes were looking up. William was born at Blackfriars in London and was followed by a sister, Mary. This little girl died aged two, when William was four. Two months before her death a second brother, John, was born, followed by James two years after that. Then another daughter, again named Mary, was born in 1636 but she also died, this time aged five, when her eldest brother was thirteen.

At about the time this sister Mary was born, William was sent to be educated by his Hammond uncle Henry and live with him and his grandmother at the parsonage house on the Earl of Leicester’s Penshurst estate in Kent. Apart from his role as a much loved uncle, Dr Hammond became a highly important figure in young William’s life, more influential in nurturing the boy’s view of himself and his relationship to the world than his own father. William was seven or eight years old at the time and would grow up with much less of his father’s political intelligence and much more of his uncle’s romantic idealism, high-mindedness and social conscience.

Henry Hammond was barely thirty when he assumed his nephew’s moral and intellectual education. Despite a complete lack of self-promotional zeal, his academic career to that point had described a blazing trajectory. Excelling at Eton in both Latin and Greek and, unusually for the time, Hebrew, he was appointed as tutor in Hebrew to the older boys. Hammond’s lack of boyish aggression was remarked on and his gentle kindness and natural piety gave cause for some alarm in his more robust teachers. But something about this quietly studious and spiritual boy gained everyone’s respect. At the age of only thirteen he was deemed ready to continue his studies at Oxford, and became a scholar at Magdalen College. Before he was twenty he had gained his master’s degree and then turned his studies to divinity and was ordained by the time he was twenty-four.

Plucked from academia and court by the Earl of Leicester and planted in his rural idyll at Penshurst, Henry Hammond took up the much more varied and less exalted responsibilities of a country parish priest. It was in this role that his reputation as the most godly and lovable of men was burnished. Not only were his sermons marvels of accessible and provocative scholarship but also his pastoral care was exemplary, funding from his own income all kinds of schemes to support local children deprived of schooling, or their families of food or shelter. Strife and disharmony physically pained him and consequently he was the most successful peacemaker between families, neighbours and colleagues.

His social life exemplified that favourite biblical invocation: ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’⁵ His contemporary and biographer, Dr John Fell, Bishop of Oxford, enjoyed this inclusive hospitality too: ‘he frequently invited his neighbours to his table, so more especially on Sundays, which seldom passed at any time without bringing some of them his guests’.⁶ In fact so generous and unexpected was his charity that sometimes it appeared to strangers that it was he who was the angel after all: ‘his beneficiaries frequently made it their wonder how the Doctor should either know of them, or their distress: and looked on his errand, who was employed to bring relief, as a vision rather than a real bounty.’⁷

When Henry Hammond took up this position as country vicar his friends immediately urged him to marry in order to acquire the kind of domestic support necessary for the post, but when he found there was a richer rival for the woman he had chosen he withdrew, reconciling himself to celibacy. Luckily, his mother, for whom he had the greatest affection, uncomplicatedly fulfilled the domestic role in his life, managing to run the household, at least for the years he was tutoring his nephew. She as grandmother added her own motherly presence to the household William entered as a boy.

William arrived from the hustle of London into this atmosphere of benign social responsibility and scholarly devotion. Equally lasting in its effects on him was the joy he discovered in nature, his own acute senses and the rich variety of rural life that surrounded him at Penshurst. But into this idyll came tragedy. William’s mother, possibly accompanied by his younger surviving siblings, arrived at the parsonage house in the summer of 1638. Mary Hammond was close to the end of her sixth pregnancy and needed the support of her own mother and beloved brother. She went into labour and on 27 August Martha was born, followed fifteen minutes later by her twin brother Henry.

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.⁸

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’.⁹ 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’.¹⁰

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.’¹¹

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.’¹² 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’.¹³ 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.’¹⁴ 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’.¹⁵ 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.’¹⁶

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’.¹⁷

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’.¹⁸

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.’¹⁹

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,^* 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’.²⁰

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.’²¹

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’.²²

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’.²³

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’.²⁴

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.’²⁵ 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’.²⁶ 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.’²⁷

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’.²⁸

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.

The bloody rupture of civil war affected everyone. William left Bishop’s Stortford School in 1643, the same year his uncle was forced out of his parish and his father was imprisoned. By then he was fifteen and although his sister claimed that he had learned as much as the school had to teach him, it was just as likely that the uncertainty of the times and his father’s fate had something to do with it too. He was old enough to go to Cambridge, the university fed by his school, but this transition was delayed by the family situation and the turmoil in the country. William’s world was in flux, his uncle had just been deprived of his living and his father disgraced and in danger. The parsonage house at Penshurst, for so long home to him, was gone, as was the family’s source of income, while his father’s life and future hung in the balance. The country had plunged into civil war.

By the summer of 1643 the royalist armies seemed to be marginally in the ascendant. It would be two years before individual parliamentary forces were consolidated into a disciplined fighting force, renamed the New Model Army, and the war swung decisively against Charles I. The destruction of life and livelihoods, the rupture of friendships and family loyalties, the waste of war were apparent everywhere.

There is no record of how William spent the eighteen months or so between his leaving school and entering university. Certainly for the first year his father was imprisoned, with all the uncertainty and hardship to his family that entailed. Only on Sir John’s release and return to England in 1644 did William’s life again seem to move forwards. On 31 August of that year William Temple was enrolled at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, with Ralph Cudworth^* as his personal tutor.

The college was known to be sympathetic to the Puritan cause and Ralph Cudworth, still a young man at twenty-seven, was a recently elected fellow with a growing reputation as a profound theological scholar and philosopher. At the time William came under his care, Cudworth was the leader of a group of young philosophers who became known as the Cambridge Platonists.^† Cudworth himself had just published his first tract, A Discourse concerning the true Notion of the Lord’s Supper, and was to remain at Emmanuel only for William’s first year before taking up in 1645 his new post as master of Clare Hall and regius professor of Hebrew. His magnum opus, The True Intellectual System of the Universe: the first part, wherein all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted and its impossibility demonstrated, was not published until 1678. Industrious, scholarly and prolific in his writings, Cudworth was described, memorably but probably unfairly, by Bolingbroke^* as someone who ‘read too much to think enough, and admired too much to think freely’.

This immensely serious and learned young man had an uphill battle getting this sixteen-year-old fresher to buckle down to the finer points of theological and moral philosophy. William’s sister recalled that Cudworth ‘would have engaged [William] in the harsh studies of logick and phylosophy wch his humor was too lively to pursue’. His disposition certainly was lively, and his interests wide-ranging and not solely intellectual. Martha, his doting sister, explained what she considered the tenor of William’s life at Cambridge: ‘Entertainments (which agreed better with [his merry disposition] & his age, especially Tennis) past most of his time there, soe that he use to say, if it bin possible in the two years time he past there to forgit all he had learn’t before, he must certainely have done it.’²⁹

This sounds like a sister’s pride in her dashing, fun-loving, older brother and she was right about his passion for tennis which he continued to play at every opportunity until gout caught up with him in his forties. She was also right about his sybaritic, sensual and adventurous nature that drew him to experience the world for himself rather than live a scholar’s life of received opinion and reflection. However, there were aspects of his tutor’s profoundly argued philosophies that might have found some answering echo in William’s own interests and style as expressed in his later essays. Cudworth explored his theory of morality from the viewpoint of Platonism. He argued that moral judgements were based on eternal and unchanging ideals but, unlike Plato, he believed these immutable values existed in the mind of God. This kind of ethical intuitionism informed much of William Temple’s gentlemanly essays, although he was less insistent on a divine presence behind the moral patterns of human behaviour. In his jottings in old age on a range of subject matters for a forthcoming essay on conversation he wrote this:

The chief ingredients into the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding … Good nature and good sense come from our births or tempers: good breeding and truth, chiefly by education and converse with men. Yet truth seems much in one’s blood, and is gained too by good sense and reflection; that nothing is a greater possession, nor of more advantage to those that have it, as well as those that deal with it.³⁰

In fact William’s lack of orthodox religious certainty was to be used against him at various times in his life when he was accused of atheism, an absence of belief that was generally feared as criminal and depraved. A young man in seventeenth-century England flirting with the thought that God was not the answer to everything was as dangerously exposed as an American flirting with Communism in the mid-1950s during the McCarthyite inquisitions. The Church abhorred unbelievers and sought to demonise them. Ralph Cudworth, William’s tutor at Emmanuel, wrote in the preface to his True Intellectual System of the Universe that he would address ‘weak, staggering and sceptical theists’ but was not even going to try to argue with atheists, for they had ‘sunk into so great a degree of sottishness [folly]’ as to be beyond redemption. Even the new breed of empirical natural scientists were horrified by this absence of Christian belief and Robert Boyle, one of the founding fathers of physics and chemistry and a leading member of the Royal Society, left money in his will for a minister to preach eight sermons a year ‘for proving the Christian religion against notorious Infidels, viz. Atheists, Theists, Pagans, Jews and Mahometans’.³¹

In France, it was illegal to publish works in defence of atheism right up to the period of the revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and in England the poet Shelley was expelled from Oxford University in 1811 for writing and distributing a moderate little pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. As late as 1869, avowed atheists could not sit in the House of Commons or give credible evidence in a court of law.

Montaigne, who became William’s intellectual hero, was most influential in marshalling and expressing the current philosophical debate as reflected through the prism of the new scepticism. His essay Apologie de Raimond Sebond summed up why all of man’s rational achievements to date were seriously in doubt. He pointed out the subjective nature of sensual experience, how personal, social and cultural factors influenced all men’s and women’s judgements, how everything we thought we knew could just as likely be a dream. The Libertins, the avant-garde intellectuals of the early seventeenth century centred in Paris, with whom William may well have had some dealings when on his travels in France, carried this scepticism to its logical conclusion of doubting even the existence of God.

While William absorbed some of the intellectual atmosphere of Emmanuel and played tennis in the open air, his impoverished father, back in London, turned his energies to bringing up the rest of his children. He returned from imprisonment in 1644 to his further diminished family, for his second daughter Mary had died three years before at the age of five. Four sons and one daughter remained and were to live into happy and successful adulthood. They were William, who was sixteen and just starting at Cambridge; John, twelve and probably at Bishop’s Stortford School; James who was ten; and the twins Henry and Martha who were only six years old. Martha remembered her father’s paternal care with gratitude: ‘though his fortunes in theese disorders of his Country were very low, he chose to spare in any thing, rather then what might be to ye advantage of his children in their breeding & Education. by wch he Contracted a Considerable debt, but lived to see it all payed.’³²

During the next two years when William pursued his studies at Cambridge the country was exhausted and sickened by the continuing bloodshed and war. The Battle of Naseby in the summer of 1645 saw Cromwell’s New Model Army humiliate the royalist forces under Prince Rupert. Dorothy’s twenty-one-year-old brother, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Osborne, was just one of the many young men who perished on that muddied, bloody field. Bristol then surrendered and finally, in June 1646, Oxford, the headquarters of Charles I’s war effort. The first of the English civil wars staggered to a halt. But there was to be only a short respite before the local uprisings against the parliamentarians and invasion of the Scots fired up the second civil war in 1648.

At this point there was no indication what William’s own sympathies in the conflict were. Although his father had been a loyal executive of the crown he was a moderate who in dismay at the increasing despotism of Charles’s rule had thrown his weight behind the parliamentary cause and had chosen a school for his son that reinforced this ideological preference. However, the person William had been closest to during his early formative years was his resolutely royalist uncle Henry Hammond. Personally and intellectually, he was progressive, rational and tolerant, but emotionally William was a patriot and a romantic with more conservative instincts. All three men, however, deplored civil war. In an essay William wrote of the ‘fatal consequences … the miseries and deplorable effects of so many foreign and civil wars … how much blood they have drawn of the bravest subjects; how they have ravaged and defaced the noblest island of the world’.³³ He saw his country as a land blessed by temperate climate and fertile soil, a beacon of happiness and moral probity to its continental neighbours, but all undermined by the bloody conflict of the worst kind of all wars.

Certainly William looked the part and owned the tastes popularly ascribed to a cavalier gentleman and, lacking ideological or religious fervour, fitted a moderate and tolerant mould much as did both his father and uncle. But he had no overweening reverence for monarchy and practised a philosophy of individual responsibility and humanist concern. Most significantly perhaps, William Temple belonged to a new, scientifically minded generation where observation and rational thought were beginning to challenge orthodox views of the natural world and superstitious elements of belief, while being careful to uphold the existence of God and His intelligent design. William was born within a few years of many of the founding members of the Royal Society: the natural philosopher Robert Boyle; the economist and scientist William Petty; the physician Thomas Willis, who became known as the father of neurology; and the brilliant scientist and architect Sir Christopher Wren, who had yet to rebuild much of London after the Great Fire of 1666. This was his generation. Even the great mathematician John Wallis, who was some twelve years older, was just leaving Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as William arrived but his influence in understanding systems, be they the forerunner of modern calculus or a language he was to invent for deaf-mutes, remained, encouraging an open-minded but analytic approach to knowledge. The intellectual atmosphere was stirring with the excitement of infinite possibilities and explanations at last for some of the mysteries of the natural world.

William Temple did not finish his degree but left Cambridge in 1647 after only two years. Perhaps the difficulties of the time, his father’s lack of funds, or his own relaxed attitude to study and desire to explore the wider world played a part in this decision. Certainly by the time he was twenty, in 1648, William was sent off on his European travels, for this was the traditional way that a young English gentleman completed the education that prepared him for the world.

This period saw the beginning of the great popularity of the Grand Tour for ‘finishing’ the education of a gentleman of quality. Dorothy’s uncle Francis Osborne, after the runaway success of his Advice to a Son, had become the arbiter of how a young gentleman like William should conduct himself in the world. Along with his age, he accepted the desirability of foreign travel for the young male but he could not wholeheartedly agree with those who claimed ‘Travel, as the best Accomplisher of Youth and Gentry’, pointing out that experience showed it more as ‘the greatest Debaucher; adding Affectation to Folly, and Atheism to the Curiosity of many not well principled by Education’.³⁴ Disapproving of the superficial kind of tourism indulged in by fools, he did agree that travel was a necessary experience in the learning of foreign languages, although was opinionated about that too: ‘Next to Experience, Languages are the Richest Lading [cargo] of a Traveller; among which French is most useful, Italian and Spanish not being so fruitful in Learning, (except for the Mathematicks and Romances) their other Books being gelt [castrated] by the Fathers of the Inquisition.’³⁵

Another of Dorothy’s famous uncles, the aesthete and regicide Sir John Danvers, saw travel in a more emotional light, declaring it was used by parents who had no intimacy with their children as a way of breaking their sons’ emotional bonds with the servants: ‘for then [the beginning of the seventeenth century] Parents were so austere and grave, that the sonnes must not be company for their father, and some company men must have; so they contracted a familiarity with the Serving men, who got a hank [hankering, bond] upon them they could hardly clawe off. Nay, Parents would suffer their Servants to domineer [prevail] over their Children: and some in what they found their child to take delight, in that would be sure to crosse them [and some parents were intent on denying their child whatever happiness he found].’³⁶

Osborne’s Advice ranged from warning not to gamble at cards while abroad (the stranger is always cheated), to exhorting the young Englishman to avoid his own countrymen (‘observed abroad [as] more quarrelsom with their own Nation than Strangers, and therefore marked out as the most dangerous Companions’³⁷) and, as a true son of the Reformation, he was keen that ‘those you see prostrate before a Crucifix’³⁸ should be pitied not scorned. When he was not anxious about a young man being inveigled into fights he could not win, or risking his money or his faith, he was most exercised about the dangers of foreign sex. If it was not the horror of a hurried marriage to ‘a mercenary Woman’ who had inflamed the boy and snared him in her toils, it was the fear that something even more shameful awaited the unwary tourist: ‘Who Travels Italy, handsom, young and beardless, may need as much caution and circumspection, to protect him from the Lust of Men, as the Charms of Women.’ Osborne had heard lurid stories how elderly homosexual men, ‘so enamoured to this uncouched^* way of Lust (led by what imaginary delight I know not)’, sent procurers out ‘to entice men of delicate Complexions, to the Houses of these decrepit Lechers’.³⁹

His concern for the right and proper conduct of a young English gentleman abroad was just part of the wide-ranging advice contained in his extraordinarily popular book that illuminated the preoccupations, inner struggles and expected conduct of the seventeenth-century English gentleman (and woman too, where their lives crossed). Published in Oxford in 1656, it was devoured by the scholars there and within two years went to five editions. It was written for William’s and Dorothy’s generation and its avid readers felt Osborne was speaking directly to them, and his comprehensive edicts on education, love and marriage, travel, government and religion were closely consulted. It was written in a worldly, practical and authoritative tone of voice, occasionally embellished with cynical wit and flights of rhetorical fancy.

A couple of years after it was first published, the book was suppressed for a while by the vice-chancellor of the university in response to several complaints by local vicars that it encouraged atheism. Half-hearted suppression by elderly members of the establishment, however, would only add to its lustre among the young. Samuel Pepys, twenty-three when it was first published, was part of the generation of aspiring young bloods to whom this book was addressed. He took note of its advice on neatness of dress, reflecting glumly on his own untidiness and the loss of social confidence this caused him. The Oxford professor of anatomy, founder member of the Royal Society (and inventor of the catamaran), the brilliant Sir William Petty, admitted in a casual conversation with Pepys in a city coffee house in January 1664 ‘that in all his life these three books were the most esteemed and generally cried up for wit in the world – Religio Medici,^* Osborne’s Advice to a Son, and Hudibras’.^† To be in such company was elevated indeed.

It took the distance of the next century, however, to kick the Advice into touch: Dr Johnson aimed his boot at its author, ‘A conceited fellow. Were a man to write so now, the boys would throw stones at him.’ This outburst had been in response to Boswell’s praise of Osborne’s work, although Boswell stuck doggedly to his original opinion that here was a writer ‘in whom I have found much shrewd and lively sense’.⁴⁰

No young man’s education was complete without some kind of sexual adventure and William was no exception. His warm emotions and romantic temperament protected him from cynicism but made him susceptible to love – the most important thing, he maintained, in his life. In his youth William appears to have had an enjoyable time, hardly surprising given his age and the fact that he was strikingly handsome, healthy and full of an exuberant energy that needed more expression than merely tennis. Unfortunately he was rash enough to boast, when he was middle-aged, to Laurence Hyde,^‡ an upwardly mobile politician who did not repay his friendship, of the sexual prowess of his youth. The much younger man found this distasteful in someone almost old enough to be his father and committed his disapproval to paper: ‘[Temple] held me in discourse a great long hour of things most relating to himself, which are never without vanity; but this was especially full of it, and some stories of his amours, and extraordinary abilities that way, which had once upon a time nearly killed him’.⁴¹ A kinder interpretation of William’s character in this revealing aside is that, older and physically impaired with gout, he wished to share his pleasure and amusement in the memory of a more vigorous and younger self.

Inevitably Francis Osborne’s handbook had an answer to the unchecked male libido. Predictably cynical about marriage, he was suspicious of love and fearful of where sexual desire could lead: he painted a ghastly picture of what horrors awaited a man who chose a woman as his wife because he found her attractive or thought he loved her: ‘Those Vertues, Graces, and reciprocal Desires, bewitched Affection expected to meet and enjoy, Fruition and Experience will find absent, and nothing left but a painted Box, which Children and time will empty of Delight; leaving Diseases behind, or, at best, incurable Antiquity.’⁴² Escape from such a snare and delusion as sexual love, he believed, was best effected by leaving the object of your desire and crossing the sea. But of course journeys abroad also brought unexpected meetings, unfamiliar freedoms and adventure of every kind.

* Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) embodied the Elizabethan ideal, being not only a man of culture and a leading literary figure but also someone at ease in the worlds of politics and military action. His early death sent his reputation skywards, the touch paper lit by his spectacular funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, the propellant being posthumous publication of his prose and poetic works.

† Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1566–1601), courtier and soldier of grandiose ambition. Favourite of an ageing queen, his desire for power and military glory, allied to arrogance and incompetence, in the end alienated everyone, apart from the populace to whom he remained a flamboyant hero. A half-baked plot against Elizabeth I forced her hand and, in his thirty-fifth year, he was tried and executed, to the dismay of the queen and her people.

‡ Petrus Ramus (1515–72) was a French humanist and logician who argued against scholasticism, insisting the general should come before the specific, consideration of the wood before the trees. As professor of philosophy at the Collège de France, his eloquence and controversial stand regularly attracted audiences of 2,000 or more. Attacks on him became even more virulent when he converted to Protestantism; he perished finally in the conflagration of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

* Master of the Rolls is an ancient office where the holder originally was keeper of the national records, acting as secretary of state and lord chancellor’s assistant. Judicial responsibilities were gradually added over the centuries until the present day when the Master of the Rolls presides over the civil division of the Court of Appeal and is second in the judicial hierarchy, behind the lord chief justice.

* For a detailed discussion of the constituents and aims of the Junto, see The Noble Revolt, John Adamson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).

* Henry Peacham (1576–1643) rather confusingly was the writer and poet son of the curate Henry Peacham (1546–1634) who was himself well known for his book on rhetoric, The Garden of Eloquence (1577). Lack of funds meant the younger Peacham was ‘Rawlie torn’ in 1598 from his student life at Cambridge to make his way in the world. He became a master of the free school at Wymondham, Norfolk, where he encountered the brutal schooling of boys that he reluctantly accepted as necessary if they were to be educated. He made his name with The Compleat Gentleman (1622), a book that was keenly read in the New England colonies, and possibly was responsible for its author’s name being immortalised in the naming of Peacham, Vermont.

* Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), an English philosopher opposed to Thomas Hobbes and leader of the Cambridge Platonists. Master of Clare Hall and then of Christ’s College, Cambridge and professor of Hebrew. He had an intellectual daughter, Damaris, Lady Masham, who became a friend of the philosophers John Locke and Leibniz.

† The Cambridge Platonists were a group of philosophers in the middle of the seventeenth century who believed that religion and reason should always be in harmony. Although closer in sympathy to the Puritan view, with its valuing of individual experience, they argued for moderation in religion and politics and like Abelard promoted a mystical understanding of reason as a pathway to the divine.

* Henry St John, Viscount Bolinbroke (1678–1751), an ambitious and unscrupulous politician and favourite of Queen Anne’s. He turned his brilliant gifts to writing philosophical and political tracts. His philosophical writings were closely based on the philosopher John Locke’s (1632–1704) inductive approach to knowledge, reasoning from observations to generalisations (to which Ralph Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists were opposed). Few were published in his lifetime. He died, after a long life, a disappointed man.

* The use of uncouched is interesting. It can mean rampant, the opposite of the heraldic term couchant, but more to the point uncouched also refers to an animal that has been driven from its lair. The image of a beast unleashed is very appropriate here, for it expressed Osborne’s fear, fascination and recoil from homosexuality: already he had referred to it as ‘noisom Bestiality’, but also that telling parenthesis revealed a curiosity about the ‘delight I know not’.

* Religio Medici was Sir Thomas Browne’s (1605–82) famous meditation on matters of faith, humanity and love, first published in 1642, reprinted often and translated into many languages. As a doctor and a Christian he illuminated his tolerant, wide-ranging thesis with classical allusions, poetry and philosophy.

† Written by Samuel Butler (1613–80), Hudibras was a mock romance in the style of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, written in three parts, each with three cantos of heavily satirical verse, published 1662–80. With his framework of a Presbyterian knight Sir Hudibras and his sectarian squire Ralpho embarked on their quest, Butler poked lethal fun at the wide world of politics, theological dogma, scholasticism, alchemy, astrology and the supernatural.

‡ Laurence Hyde, 4th Earl of Rochester (1641–1711), was the second son of the great politician and historian the Earl of Clarendon. A royalist, he rose to power and influence at Charles II’s restoration and was made an earl in 1681, becoming lord high treasurer under his brother-in-law James II. His nieces became Queens Mary and Anne.