In France, it was illegal to publish works in defence of atheism right up to the period of the revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and in England the poet Shelley was expelled from Oxford University in 1811 for writing and distributing a moderate little pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. As late as 1869, avowed atheists could not sit in the House of Commons or give credible evidence in a court of law.
Montaigne, who became William’s intellectual hero, was most influential in marshalling and expressing the current philosophical debate as reflected through the prism of the new scepticism. His essay Apologie de Raimond Sebond summed up why all of man’s rational achievements to date were seriously in doubt. He pointed out the subjective nature of sensual experience, how personal, social and cultural factors influenced all men’s and women’s judgements, how everything we thought we knew could just as likely be a dream. The Libertins, the avant-garde intellectuals of the early seventeenth century centred in Paris, with whom William may well have had some dealings when on his travels in France, carried this scepticism to its logical conclusion of doubting even the existence of God.
While William absorbed some of the intellectual atmosphere of Emmanuel and played tennis in the open air, his impoverished father, back in London, turned his energies to bringing up the rest of his children. He returned from imprisonment in 1644 to his further diminished family, for his second daughter Mary had died three years before at the age of five. Four sons and one daughter remained and were to live into happy and successful adulthood. They were William, who was sixteen and just starting at Cambridge; John, twelve and probably at Bishop’s Stortford School; James who was ten; and the twins Henry and Martha who were only six years old. Martha remembered her father’s paternal care with gratitude: ‘though his fortunes in theese disorders of his Country were very low, he chose to spare in any thing, rather then what might be to ye advantage of his children in their breeding & Education. by wch he Contracted a Considerable debt, but lived to see it all payed.’32
During the next two years when William pursued his studies at Cambridge the country was exhausted and sickened by the continuing bloodshed and war. The Battle of Naseby in the summer of 1645 saw Cromwell’s New Model Army humiliate the royalist forces under Prince Rupert. Dorothy’s twenty-one-year-old brother, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Osborne, was just one of the many young men who perished on that muddied, bloody field. Bristol then surrendered and finally, in June 1646, Oxford, the headquarters of Charles I’s war effort. The first of the English civil wars staggered to a halt. But there was to be only a short respite before the local uprisings against the parliamentarians and invasion of the Scots fired up the second civil war in 1648.
At this point there was no indication what William’s own sympathies in the conflict were. Although his father had been a loyal executive of the crown he was a moderate who in dismay at the increasing despotism of Charles’s rule had thrown his weight behind the parliamentary cause and had chosen a school for his son that reinforced this ideological preference. However, the person William had been closest to during his early formative years was his resolutely royalist uncle Henry Hammond. Personally and intellectually, he was progressive, rational and tolerant, but emotionally William was a patriot and a romantic with more conservative instincts. All three men, however, deplored civil war. In an essay William wrote of the ‘fatal consequences … the miseries and deplorable effects of so many foreign and civil wars … how much blood they have drawn of the bravest subjects; how they have ravaged and defaced the noblest island of the world’.33 He saw his country as a land blessed by temperate climate and fertile soil, a beacon of happiness and moral probity to its continental neighbours, but all undermined by the bloody conflict of the worst kind of all wars.
Certainly William looked the part and owned the tastes popularly ascribed to a cavalier gentleman and, lacking ideological or religious fervour, fitted a moderate and tolerant mould much as did both his father and uncle. But he had no overweening reverence for monarchy and practised a philosophy of individual responsibility and humanist concern. Most significantly perhaps, William Temple belonged to a new, scientifically minded generation where observation and rational thought were beginning to challenge orthodox views of the natural world and superstitious elements of belief, while being careful to uphold the existence of God and His intelligent design. William was born within a few years of many of the founding members of the Royal Society: the natural philosopher Robert Boyle; the economist and scientist William Petty; the physician Thomas Willis, who became known as the father of neurology; and the brilliant scientist and architect Sir Christopher Wren, who had yet to rebuild much of London after the Great Fire of 1666. This was his generation. Even the great mathematician John Wallis, who was some twelve years older, was just leaving Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as William arrived but his influence in understanding systems, be they the forerunner of modern calculus or a language he was to invent for deaf-mutes, remained, encouraging an open-minded but analytic approach to knowledge. The intellectual atmosphere was stirring with the excitement of infinite possibilities and explanations at last for some of the mysteries of the natural world.
William Temple did not finish his degree but left Cambridge in 1647 after only two years. Perhaps the difficulties of the time, his father’s lack of funds, or his own relaxed attitude to study and desire to explore the wider world played a part in this decision. Certainly by the time he was twenty, in 1648, William was sent off on his European travels, for this was the traditional way that a young English gentleman completed the education that prepared him for the world.
This period saw the beginning of the great popularity of the Grand Tour for ‘finishing’ the education of a gentleman of quality. Dorothy’s uncle Francis Osborne, after the runaway success of his Advice to a Son, had become the arbiter of how a young gentleman like William should conduct himself in the world. Along with his age, he accepted the desirability of foreign travel for the young male but he could not wholeheartedly agree with those who claimed ‘Travel, as the best Accomplisher of Youth and Gentry’, pointing out that experience showed it more as ‘the greatest Debaucher; adding Affectation to Folly, and Atheism to the Curiosity of many not well principled by Education’.34 Disapproving of the superficial kind of tourism indulged in by fools, he did agree that travel was a necessary experience in the learning of foreign languages, although was opinionated about that too: ‘Next to Experience, Languages are the Richest Lading [cargo] of a Traveller; among which French is most useful, Italian and Spanish not being so fruitful in Learning, (except for the Mathematicks and Romances) their other Books being gelt [castrated] by the Fathers of the Inquisition.’35
Another of Dorothy’s famous uncles, the aesthete and regicide Sir John Danvers, saw travel in a more emotional light, declaring it was used by parents who had no intimacy with their children as a way of breaking their sons’ emotional bonds with the servants: ‘for then [the beginning of the seventeenth century] Parents were so austere and grave, that the sonnes must not be company for their father, and some company men must have; so they contracted a familiarity with the Serving men, who got a hank [hankering, bond] upon them they could hardly clawe off. Nay, Parents would suffer their Servants to domineer [prevail] over their Children: and some in what they found their child to take delight, in that would be sure to crosse them [and some parents were intent on denying their child whatever happiness he found].’36
Osborne’s Advice ranged from warning not to gamble at cards while abroad (the stranger is always cheated), to exhorting the young Englishman to avoid his own countrymen (‘observed abroad [as] more quarrelsom with their own Nation than Strangers, and therefore marked out as the most dangerous Companions’37) and, as a true son of the Reformation, he was keen that ‘those you see prostrate before a Crucifix’38 should be pitied not scorned. When he was not anxious about a young man being inveigled into fights he could not win, or risking his money or his faith, he was most exercised about