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

a Violence to mee, as that which moves my compasson[.] I can resist with Ease any sort of People but beggers. If this bee a fault in mee, tis at least a well natured one, and therefore I hope you will forgive it mee.’²¹ Growing up at Chicksands, Dorothy’s days had a rhythm and regularity dictated by the seasons and interrupted only by the visits of family and friends. Journeys were difficult and lengthy and young unmarried women could not undertake them on their own, so Dorothy usually had to wait until an obliging member of her large extended family could accompany her. In one of her later letters to William, Dorothy described in detail the pattern of her daily life. She happened to choose a June day in 1653 when she was twenty-six but, as she made clear, the pattern of rural life remained essentially unaltered through the years: it is reasonable to believe it was a sketch of many summer days at Chicksands when she was still a girl. It is this famous passage that Virginia Woolf recalled when she gazed on that country wedding in 1928.

      You ask mee how I passe my time heer, I can give you a perfect accounte not only of what I doe for the present, but what I am likely to do this seven yeare if I only stay heer soe long. I rise in the morning reasonably Early, and before I am redy I goe rounde the house til I am weary of that, and then into the garden till it grows to[o] hott for mee. About ten a clock I think of making mee redy, and when that’s don I goe into my fathers Chamber, from thence to dinner, where my cousin [Henry] Molle and I sitt in great State, in a Roome & at a table that would hold a great many more. After dinner wee sit and talk till Mr B [Levinus Bennet, Sheriff of Cambridgeshire] com’s in question and then I am gon. The heat of the day is spent in reading or working [needlework] and about sixe or seven a Clock, I walke out into a Common that lyes hard by the house where a great many young wenches keep Sheep and Cow’s and sitt in the shade singing of Ballads; I goe to them and compare theire voices and Beauty’s to some Ancient Shepherdesses that I have read of and finde a vast difference there, but trust mee I think these are as innocent as those could bee. I talke to them and finde they want nothing to make them the happiest People in the world, but the Knoledge that they are soe. Most Comonly when wee are in the middest of our discourse one looks aboute her and spyes her Cow’s goeing into the Corne and then away they all run, as if they had wing’s at theire heels. I that am not soe nimble stay behinde, & when I see them driving home theire Cattle I think tis time for mee to retyre too. When I have supped I goe into the Garden and soe to the side of a small River that runs by it where I sitt downe and wish you with me.²²

      Under the brilliance of this evocation of the centuries-old pattern of country life and the idyll of an English summer day lay a sense of personal frustration. While the herd girls were unaware, Dorothy believed, of the sublime simplicity of their lives she, the young unmarried daughter of the estate, was over-conscious of her own youth idled away while she waited on the will of others. She was richer, better educated and living in greater comfort than the girls minding the cattle, yet she had to look to marriage for purpose in her life and seemed in part to envy the useful and natural freedom of their days. Where she was solitary they had comradeship; where she was weighed down with her heavy seventeenth-century dress, its tight bodice and bulky petticoats and all the expectations laid upon a lady of quality, they were less encumbered, sprightly and carefree. In reality the lives of these country girls were hard and narrow, and winter would have made their labour much less enviable, but Dorothy’s reaction to their lively conversation and the simplicity of their working lives, making them ‘the happiest People in the world’, revealed the feeling that her own life lacked autonomy and purpose.

The civil war that began in 1642 only destroyed for a while this ordered rural life, but the Osbornes’ easy prosperity was gone for ever. The effects on the family were catastrophic but commonplace. Two of Dorothy’s brothers died in action fighting for the king; Henry, lieutenant colonel of foot, at the Battle of Naseby in 1645 when he was thirty-one and Charles, only seven years older than Dorothy, also lieutenant colonel of foot, was killed at Hartland in Devon the following year when he was twenty-six. The depredations went deep and wide: her father’s annual income was reduced by 90 per cent to £400 per annum;^* both parents were prematurely aged by the hazards and relentless strain of their circumstances, and Dorothy herself, temporarily at least, lost her belief in a benign world. But along with the destruction and suffering of war also came opportunity. Civil war particularly touched everyone and it affected Dorothy’s life as deeply as any. Most significantly, it interrupted the rural seclusion of her life, introducing her to new and at times alarming experiences, and it disrupted the marriage dance choreographed for her by the wider family.

      Dorothy’s early life had been lived against the uncertain backdrop of Charles I’s personal rule. After his relationship with a succession of parliaments had broken down over intractable financial, political and religious issues, the king had dismissed his 1629 parliament with little intention of meeting them again. He became increasingly isolated from his own people who were suspicious that his private relationships, with his Catholic wife Henrietta Maria and reckless favourite Buckingham, until his assassination in 1629, exerted a sinister influence on his public policies. After what was called the ‘Eleven Years’ Tyranny’, Charles was forced to recall parliament in 1640 and agree to a raft of concessions, limiting his power and redressing some of the grievances against him. These agreements he subsequently ignored. Having lost the trust of a thoroughly disenchanted parliament, the king withdrew from Westminster and in the summer of 1642 raised his standard at Nottingham, marking the formal start of civil war.

      Dorothy was fifteen when the country’s gentry and nobility were forced to choose between their king or their elected parliament. This choice could be a matter of life and death, placing their fortunes, their lives and the lives of their retainers at the disposal of their masters at war. There was no doubt that Dorothy’s father was one of the king’s men. Her immediate family seems to have been solidly royalist, with four brothers at least available to serve their king, two of whom were sacrificed in the process.

      So it was that loyal Sir Peter Osborne was called upon once more to defend Castle Cornet, the only royalist stronghold in Guernsey, an independent-minded island long attached to its Presbyterianism, which had declared quickly for parliament. By comparison, its larger neighbour, Jersey, remained royalist largely due to the pervasive influence of the all-powerful Carteret family. Lieutenant governor of the island at the time was Captain Carteret, later Sir George Carteret, who was a man of outstanding courage and capability as a naval commander but also acquisitive and ambitious for himself. He had freedom of movement and action while Sir Peter stoically endured real privation in his attempt to hold Castle Cornet against a hostile populace. Carteret’s opportunism and Sir Peter’s incorruptible and ingenuous nature, together with his reliance on Carteret for much of the provisions needed by his garrison, meant conflict between the two governors was inevitable.

      When Sir Peter Osborne returned to Guernsey in 1642 the inhabitants were already ill-disposed towards him. They had long memories of the unwelcome garrison he had brought over during the fear of invasion in 1627 and imposed on them for two years. There was natural antipathy anyway towards the mainland and previous governors who had looked to help themselves to the lion’s share of island revenues. The inhabitants’ independence was also fostered by the republican sensibilities of many of their clergy, some of whom were French Calvinists escaping from the cruel persecutions of their own king. Although there were no hostilities at first, from the beginning of the civil war Sir Peter seems to have lived in the castle almost entirely separate from the townspeople and islanders. This they resented, eventually listing their complaints against him the following year in a letter to the Earl of Warwick, whom Cromwell had appointed as governor of Jersey and Guernsey. The gist of these complaints was Osborne’s aloofness from the islanders and his misuse of the king’s grants by building promenades and genteel accommodation within the castle rather than bolstering its fortifications and providing extra billets for the soldiers.

      By the spring of 1643, parliament had issued instructions to the newly appointed commissioners in Guernsey to seize Sir Peter Osborne and convey him back to them to answer for his disobedience and various other misdemeanours. When the commissioners attempted to fulfil this order, Sir Peter refused all compromise and threatened