She went on to explain how frustrating it was when people tried so hard for effect that they obscured meaning, like one gentleman she knew ‘whoe would never say the weather grew cold, but that the Winter began to salute us’.35 Whether this was ‘the Emperour’s’ stylistic weakness she did not say but continued her characterisation of him in subsequent letters: he was over-strict with his poor daughters (and Dorothy surmised would have been with her too if she had become his wife) and ‘keep’s them soe much Prisoners to a Vile house he has in Northamptonshyre, that if once I had but let them loose they and his Learning would have bin sufficient to have made him mad, without my helpe’. She also enjoyed exploring the conceit with William that in marrying Isham she would then offer one of her stepdaughters to him in marriage ‘and ’tis certaine I had proved a most Exelent Mother in Law’.36
Dorothy’s lively descriptions of a colourful list of suitors not only entertained William, they also inevitably impressed him with the competition he was up against and quickened his already urgent desire. She knew this and throughout there was a sense of her playfulness and control. She was relating these stories in the January and February of 1653 but this particular courtship had taken place the previous spring and early summer, as was clear in the laconic entries in her brother Henry’s diary. By the beginning of March 1652, Henry had thought it necessary to prod Sir Justinian Isham into some kind of definite offer. There were various dealings between the two families, and Dorothy’s polite but evasive stance seemed to win out.
William’s young friend, Sir Thomas Osborne, who had been such a good companion to him during his first travels in France, also decided to open marriage negotiations with Dorothy, the girl he had known all his life as his older cousin, aged twenty-five to his twenty-one. This frantic marriage-trading overlapped with the Sir Justinian Isham period. Again brother Henry’s diary recorded meetings between the suitors and their families: letters whizzed back and forth, with Dorothy under pressure but holding her ground. There was some exasperation or misunderstanding and Sir Thomas’s mother, Lady Osborne, broke off negotiations. Dorothy was then removed from her brother-in-law’s London house, where she had been staying, as her favourite niece, Dorothy Peyton, and her stepmother Lady Peyton had contracted smallpox. By 10 April, the dread disease had attacked Thomas Osborne too. All three were to survive but the aftermath of the failed marriage negotiations continued to haunt Dorothy.
Henry’s diary told how the following month the protagonists converged on Aunt Gargrave’s house: first Lady Osborne explained why they had withdrawn; then Dorothy gave her version of events; and finally Sir Thomas related ‘what hee had said to his mother’. In the middle of all these excuses and accusations, Sir Justinian Isham re-entered the fray. Dorothy was isolated and under siege but courageously maintained her resistance. Her despairing brother, usually so matter-of-fact and unemotional in his diary entries, confided on 28 June this heartfelt cry: ‘I vowed a vow to God to say a prayer everie day for my sister and when shee is married to give God thanks that day everie day as long as I lived.’37
Sir Justinian quickly found a more receptive hand in Vere, the daughter of Lord Leigh of Stoneleigh. They married in 1653 and she produced two sons, each of whom inherited their father’s baronetcy. Like the Emperour, Sir Thomas Osborne also married in 1653 although Dorothy had already felt that their relationship as cousins was spoiled by the sour end to their courtship. This affected even his friendship with William, she feared: ‘Sir T. I suppose avoyd’s you as a freind [suitor] of mine, my Brother tells mee they meet somtim’s and have the most adoe to pull of theire hatts to one another that can bee, and never speake. If I were in Towne i’le undertake, hee would venture the being Choaked for want of Aire rather than stirre out of doores, for feare of meeting mee.’38
Little wonder that she retired during the late summer of 1652 to the spa at Epsom, just outside London, to take the waters there. Leaving Chicksands on 16 August, Dorothy was to spend over two weeks drinking the waters daily in hope of a cure. She often referred to how she suffered from melancholy and low or irritable spirits that were commonly called ‘the Spleen’. This time her indisposition was due to ‘a Scurvy Spleen’ with little indication as to what scurvy meant in that context. In a later essay, ‘Of health and Long Life’, William, writing about the fashions in health complaints and various cures, claimed that once every ailment was called the spleen, then it was called the scurvy, so perhaps Dorothy’s doctor was covering all possibilities. It could be that she had a skin disease alongside the depression (the Epsom waters were good for skin complaints), or in fact she might have been using ‘scurvy’ figuratively meaning a sorry or contemptible thing, in this case her depression. She was aware of the fact that some people considered ‘the Spleen’ a largely hysterical condition and therefore wholly feminine, and was shy of naming William’s occasional depressions of spirit as melancholy: ‘I forsaw you would not bee willing to owne a disease, that the severe part of the worlde holde to bee meerly imaginary and affected, and therefore proper only to women.’39
There was no doubt that Dorothy herself considered her symptoms to be real, even ominous. Her brother Henry and his friends had no sensitivity to her feelings and threatened her with imbecility, even madness, as she reported to William: ‘[they] doe soe fright mee with strange story’s of what the S[pleen] will bring mee in time, that I am kept in awe with them like a Childe. They tell mee ’twill not leave mee common sence, that I can hardly bee fitt company for my own dog’s, and that it will ende, either in a stupidnesse that will have mee incapable of any thing, or fill my head with such whim’s as will make mee, rediculous.’40
So concerned was she that she used to dose herself with steel, against William’s advice. This involved immersing a bar of steel in white wine overnight and then drinking the infusion the next morning. The effects were unpleasant: ‘’tis not to be imagin’d how sick it makes mee for an hower or two, and, which is the missery all that time one must be useing some kinde of Exercise’. Such prescribed exercise meant for Dorothy playing shuttlecock with a friend while she felt more and more nauseous. The effects were so extreme, she wrote to William, ‘that every day at ten o clock I am makeing my will, and takeing leave of all my friend’s, you will beleeve you are not forgot then … ’tis worse then dyeing, by the halfe’.41 By the next morning, all the suffering would be worthwhile ‘for Joy that I am well againe’.42
William was not convinced by this treatment, in fact he had little respect for doctors or their cures, and it was obvious from Dorothy’s letters that he would rather she desist. The effects of ‘the Spleen’ interested him and in the same essay on health he gave a description drawn from his personal experience in his own family, together with a very modern analysis of the importance of attitude of mind in maintaining health:
whatever the spleen is, whether a disease of the part so called, or of people that ail something, but they no not what; it is certainly a very ill ingredient into any other disease, and very often dangerous. For, as hope is the sovereign balsam of life, and the best cordial of all distempers both of body and mind; so fear, and regret, and melancholy apprehensions, which are the usual effects of the spleen, with the distractions, disquiets, or at least intranquillity they occasion, are the worst accidents that can attend any diseases; and make them often mortal, which would otherwise pass, and have had but a common course.43
Dorothy returned from Epsom on 4 September 1652 only to find her brother Henry, who was fast becoming the bane of her life,