PREFACE

      ‘In the seventeenth century, to be sure, Lewis the Fourteenth [Louis XIV] was a much more important person than Temple’s sweetheart. But death and time equalize all things … The mutual relations of the two sexes seem to us to be at least as important as the mutual relations of any two governments in the world; and a series of letters written by a virtuous, amiable, sensible girl, and intended for the eye of her lover alone, can scarcely fail to throw some light on the relations of the sexes.’

      THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, Essays

      THE LIVES OF Dorothy Osborne and William Temple are bound together in one of the great love stories of the seventeenth century, with timeless elements that all of us, like Macaulay, recognise and share. But they also offer a personal view of their world. Against a background of civil-war destruction and family power, it is a world of letters and gardens, of friendship and scientific experiment, of international Realpolitik fraught with the treachery of princes. We only know their story because of a terrific piece of good luck. Seventy-seven letters written by Dorothy to William during their long clandestine courtship survive. Throughout we hear Dorothy’s voice, flirtatious, politically canny, philosophical and overflowing with feeling. ‘Love is a Terrible word,’ she wrote to William, ‘and I should blush to death if anything but a letter accuses me on’t.’ Into their letters went all the thoughts and emotions too difficult or dangerous to say in person and their honesty and the details of their lives open up a shaft of light on this period, this man, this woman.

      Intelligent, eloquent,