Read My Heart: Dorothy Osborne and Sir William Temple, A Love Story in the Age of Revolution. Jane Dunn
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and essays in which their humour and humanity dissolve the barriers of time and circumstance to bring them both to life again. What is more, they lived through one of the most eventful centuries of British history, marked with both bloody and peaceful revolutions. The age is illuminated through the contrasting experiences of these two gentry families, the Osbornes indomitably royalist and the Temples more pragmatically parliamentarian – but open to offers. Dorothy and William faced hardships and reversals, resisted family threats and blackmail, and in the end triumphed over all, even the spectre of illness and death, to marry at last. William went on, in the reign of Charles II, to become a fluent and engaging essayist, an innovative gardener and a celebrated diplomat, with Dorothy so actively engaged at his side that she was termed ‘Lady Ambassadress’.
All this contributes to the appeal of their story. But nothing of their love affair would be known in any detail if these letters had not survived, and it is William, unable to bring himself to destroy them as the lovers had agreed to do, in a desperate attempt to evade detection, who ensures their love a lasting memorial. There was initially a larger hoard, so much so that Dorothy wondered what William meant to do with all her letters, joking he had ‘enough to load a horse’. It is possible that the majority were destroyed by a protective granddaughter in the more circumspect eighteenth century. What remain, however, represent the last two years of a six-and-a-half-year courtship and were recognised by William and then his sister Martha as wonderful literary creations, and, even then, worthy of publication. These seventy-seven letters and a few later notes were saved, wrapped in bundles and stored in a special cabinet, still in the possession of the Osborn family.
Over crisp sheets of paper Dorothy’s elegant cursive hand wrote in measured loops and curlicues of everything that mattered to her, from her deepest hopes and feelings to shopping requests and the gossip of the neighbourhood. Letters were the only means of communication between them, and on to paper she and William poured all their pent-up emotion, their covert rebellion against family and the thrill of exploring philosophical and political ideas. These love letters were not only powerful tools of seduction but also revealing of the lovers themselves in the continual ebb and flow of conversation.
But history rolled on and although William’s celebrity for a while did not fade, Dorothy and her story remained silent, known only to her descendants who guarded the letters, recognising their extraordinary quality, until the Victorians discovered her and fell in love. There is no other word for the emotion she aroused in fine intellectual Victorian gentlemen such as the great historian and essayist Thomas Babington Macaulay, William’s first biographer the Right Honourable Thomas Peregrine Courtenay, and the first editor of Dorothy’s letters Edward Abbott Parry. All these men declared themselves to be among her ‘servants’, i.e. suitors for her hand.
Courtenay first brought Dorothy to public gaze when he incorporated part of forty-two of her letters in his biography of William, Memoirs of the Life, Works and Correspondence of Sir William Temple, published in 1836. It was in a lengthy essay review that Macaulay revealed his own tenderness for the Dorothy of the letters. His description of her character as he saw it, however, showed more his own prejudices: ‘She is said to have been handsome; and there remains abundant proof that she possessed an ample share of the dexterity, the vivacity and the tenderness of her sex.’
Though enchanted by the letters, this lofty Victorian still managed to underestimate their great literary and historical value, and patronised the author while he praised her: ‘Her own style is very agreeable; nor are her letters at all the worse for some passages in which raillery and tenderness are mixed in a very engaging namby-pamby.’
The young barrister Edward Abbott Parry, later to be a judge and knighted, was equally enchanted by the Dorothy who emerged from the shadows in her husband’s biography. After publishing his own essay on her he was contacted by the Longe family, descendants of Dorothy’s and keepers of her papers, and given permission to edit a book of the letters the family had guarded for so long. Parry’s edition of seventy of the letters, Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple 1652–54, was published in 1888 and enjoyed an immediate success. One anonymous reviewer in Temple Bar expressed a general consensus in hailing, ‘a most loveable portrait of a charming and high-souled woman, who possessed strong common sense, the clearest judgement and a keen sense of humour’. These seventy letters were bought by the British Museum in 1891 (an extra seven seem to have been retained by the family) and many published editions of her letters followed, the later ones incorporating all seventy-seven. My husband Nick Ostler, ever a truffle-hunting boar when it comes to second-hand bookshops, turned up one of these editions in Padstow in Cornwall and immediately my fascination with Dorothy and William and their life began.
To my surprise there has never been a biography of Dorothy Osborne, apart from an elegant but soft-centred essay by Lord David Cecil in his book about her and Thomas Gray, Two Quiet Lives. Dorothy, nevertheless, has become famous in the history of English literature as an early and brilliant exponent of the epistolary art, but her complex personality and the extraordinary adventures of her life – if they have been mentioned at all – are used merely as context for her letters.
William has been better served, his life more public, his achievements recognised in the world of men. There have been a few biographies of him, most notably the first by the Victorian Courtenay and a judicious and comprehensive modern life published by Homer E. Woodbridge in 1940. They inevitably concentrated on the man, his ideas and diplomatic career, with Dorothy very much off-stage as the silent supportive spouse. In fact it was a marriage of intellectual equals, as Dorothy had always intended it should be, and as the more egalitarian Dutch fully recognised when William was ambassador there: it is more interesting and truthful, to my mind, to place them side by side and attempt to write about their lives together.
There are few female voices that call to us from the early seventeenth century and no one has been more full of character, or more conversationally present as we read her words than Dorothy Osborne. William’s letters and essays also are so seemingly modern in their frankness and informality, his confiding voice draws us into his life while revealing his warmth and easy charm. His literary style was held up as exemplary for at least two centuries after his death: he was considered by many to be the best essayist of the restoration after Dryden. Dr Johnson credited William with being the first writer to bring cadence to English prose and Charles Lamb wrote an essay commending his ability to mimic casual conversation, ‘his plain natural chit-chat’ as if from an easy chair, while sharing nuggets of information and inventive speculations that effortlessly informed and entertained his readers.
Editions of Dorothy’s letters and William’s essays were found in every good literary library during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The distinguished poet Peter Porter, inspired by Dorothy’s letters, wrote the poems for a song cycle composed by Nicholas Maw, The Voice of Love.* But in subsequent years they have slipped from view. Dorothy and William’s re-emergence into public consciousness is well overdue: their love story is timeless, and the period of revolutions and unrest in which they played their part resonates with the preoccupations and political shifts today.
Dorothy Osborne and William Temple grew up during the British civil wars. They were fifteen and fourteen respectively when Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham in 1642, heralding the beginning of the greatest political and social turmoil in the nation’s history. They were still only twenty-one and twenty when the king was executed in January 1649. In recent times the suffering of the Serbs and Croats as Yugoslavia turned on itself brings something of the domestic terror of civil wars home to us now. But nineteenth-century critics, who discovered Dorothy Osborne through her letters, liked to see her as the embodiment of English life, womanly discretion and the national virtues of stoicism, humour and keeping up appearances. Even Virginia Woolf recalls Dorothy’s memory to bolster a moment of awe at the continuity of rural life, remembering a delightful passage in one of Dorothy’s letters where she describes an afternoon spent with local shepherdesses in the fields.
But civil war touched everyone and destroyed more than flesh and stone. Trust and hope for the future were also casualties in this most pernicious of conflicts. William Temple’s family were parliamentarians, although