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