† The Cambridge Platonists were a group of philosophers in the middle of the seventeenth century who believed that religion and reason should always be in harmony. Although closer in sympathy to the Puritan view, with its valuing of individual experience, they argued for moderation in religion and politics and like Abelard promoted a mystical understanding of reason as a pathway to the divine.
* Henry St John, Viscount Bolinbroke (1678–1751), an ambitious and unscrupulous politician and favourite of Queen Anne’s. He turned his brilliant gifts to writing philosophical and political tracts. His philosophical writings were closely based on the philosopher John Locke’s (1632–1704) inductive approach to knowledge, reasoning from observations to generalisations (to which Ralph Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists were opposed). Few were published in his lifetime. He died, after a long life, a disappointed man.
* The use of uncouched is interesting. It can mean rampant, the opposite of the heraldic term couchant, but more to the point uncouched also refers to an animal that has been driven from its lair. The image of a beast unleashed is very appropriate here, for it expressed Osborne’s fear, fascination and recoil from homosexuality: already he had referred to it as ‘noisom Bestiality’, but also that telling parenthesis revealed a curiosity about the ‘delight I know not’.
* Religio Medici was Sir Thomas Browne’s (1605–82) famous meditation on matters of faith, humanity and love, first published in 1642, reprinted often and translated into many languages. As a doctor and a Christian he illuminated his tolerant, wide-ranging thesis with classical allusions, poetry and philosophy.
† Written by Samuel Butler (1613–80), Hudibras was a mock romance in the style of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, written in three parts, each with three cantos of heavily satirical verse, published 1662–80. With his framework of a Presbyterian knight Sir Hudibras and his sectarian squire Ralpho embarked on their quest, Butler poked lethal fun at the wide world of politics, theological dogma, scholasticism, alchemy, astrology and the supernatural.
‡ Laurence Hyde, 4th Earl of Rochester (1641–1711), was the second son of the great politician and historian the Earl of Clarendon. A royalist, he rose to power and influence at Charles II’s restoration and was made an earl in 1681, becoming lord high treasurer under his brother-in-law James II. His nieces became Queens Mary and Anne.
Time nor Accidents Shall not Prevaile
I will write Every week, and noe misse of letters shall give us any doubts of one another, Time nor accidents shall not prevaile upon our hearts, and if God Almighty please to blesse us, wee will meet the same wee are, or happyer; I will doe all you bid mee, I will pray, and wish and hope, but you must doe soe too then; and bee soe carfull of your self that I may have nothing to reproche you with when you come back.
DOROTHY OSBORNE, letter to William Temple
[11/12 February 1654]
ALTHOUGH TRAVEL ABROAD was accepted as an important part of the education of a young English gentleman of the seventeenth century, a young unmarried lady was denied any such freedom; even travelling at home she was expected to be chaperoned at all times. For her to venture abroad to educate the mind was an almost inconceivable thought. But much more unsettling to the authority of the family, to her reputation and the whole social foundation of their lives was the idea that a young man and woman might meet outside the jurisdiction of their parents’ wishes, free to make their own connections, even to fall in love.
Not only were serendipitous meetings like that of Dorothy and William unorthodox for young people in their station of life, the idea that they themselves could choose whom they wanted to marry on the grounds of personal liking, even love, was considered a short cut to social anarchy, even lunacy. With universal constraints and expectations like this it was remarkable that they should ever have met, let alone discovered how much they really liked each other. Their candour in expressing their feelings in private also belied the carefulness of their public face. Dorothy admitted to William her eccentricity in this: ‘I am apt to speak what I think; and to you have soe accoustumed my self to discover all my heart, that I doe not beleeve twill ever bee in my power to conceal a thought from you.’1
The grip that family and society’s disapproval exerted was hard to shake off. In a later essay when he himself was old, William likened the denial of the heart to a kind of hardening of the arteries that too often accompanied old age: ‘youth naturally most inclined to the better passions; love, desire, ambition, joy,’ he wrote. ‘Age to the worst; avarice, grief, revenge, jealousy, envy, suspicion.’2
Dorothy had youth on her side and laid claim to all those better passions, but it was the unique and shattering effects of civil war that broke the constraints on her life and sprang her into the active universe of men. Although personally strong-minded and individualistic, her intent was always to comply with her family’s and society’s expectations, for she was an intellectual and reflective young woman and not a natural revolutionary. But for the war she would have been safely sequestered at home, visitors vetted by her family, her world narrowed to the view from a casement window. In fact this containment is what she had to return to, but for a while she was almost autonomous, a traveller across the sea – accompanied by a young brother, true, but he more inclined to play the daredevil than the careful chaperone.
As they both set off on their travels, heading on their different journeys towards the Isle of Wight, both Dorothy and William would have had all kinds of prejudice and practical advice ringing in their ears. Travel itself was fraught with danger: horses bolted, coaches regularly overturned, cut-throats ambushed the unwary and boats capsized in terrible seas. Disease and injury of the nastiest kinds were everyday risks with none of the basic palliatives of drugs for pain relief and penicillin for infection, or even a competent medical profession more likely to heal than to harm. The extent of the rule of law was limited and easily corrupted, and dark things happened under a foreign sun when the traveller’s fate would be known to no one.
As William Temple began his adventures for education and pleasure, Dorothy Osborne was propelled by very different circumstances into hers. Travel was hazardous, but it was considered particularly so if you were female. One problem was the necessity for a woman of keeping her public reputation spotless while inevitably attracting the male gaze, with all its hopeful delusions.
Lord Savile, in his Worldly Counsel to a Daughter, a more limited manual than Osborne’s Advice to a Son, was kindly and apologetic at the manifest unfairnesses of woman’s lot, yet careful not to encourage any daughter of his, or anyone else’s, to challenge the sacred status quo. He pointed out that innocent friendliness in a young woman might be misrepresented by both opportunistic men, full of vanity and desire, and women eager to make themselves appear more virtuous by slandering the virtue of their sisters, ‘therefore, nothing is with more care to be avoided than such a kind of civility as may be mistaken for invitation’. The onus was very much upon the young woman who had always to be polite while continually on guard lest her behaviour call forth misunderstanding and shame. She had to cultivate ‘a way of living that may prevent all coarse railleries or unmannerly freedoms; looks that forbid without rudeness, and oblige without invitation, or leaving