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