The civil wars stamped a heavy footprint on the impressionable years of their youth. Both Dorothy Osborne and William Temple grew to adulthood in a country at war with itself. But when the old regimes are lost, there is everything to play for in the creation of the new. They took their places on the world stage during Charles II’s reign, attempting to promote peace and prosperity by building strong bonds with the Dutch, the most successful mercantile nation of the age. With William away, Dorothy and their family also lived through the terror of the Great Plague in London which, to everyone’s horrified disbelief, was followed by the Great Fire that destroyed much of the city, for a while appearing to be an outrageous act of international terrorism. William and Dorothy played a crucial role in one of the most important alliances in that rebellious century – the marriage of William of Orange with Mary, James II’s daughter, whose claim to the throne would make possible the remarkable Glorious Revolution of 1688 that finally secured the nation’s religion as Protestant with William and Mary on the throne.
William and Dorothy both lived to old age and died in their own beds, having survived smallpox, plague and the deaths of all nine children before them. They had lived honourably and well, as the confidants of princes, queens and kings, but had been concerned too for their servants and for the sailors, soldiers and yeomen who made the country work. In the end, William was a better man than diplomat: sent to lie abroad for his country he would not compromise his personal principles and refused to do his monarch’s dirty work. His career began with meteoric ascent, but lacking the propellant of ambition it fell to earth, where he was happiest. There in his gardens and library, in the midst of family and friends he reflected on life and looked outwards to the world. Their happy domestic life allowed him and Dorothy to endure the tragedies that befell them, seeking solace from their friends, their reading and writing, the revolving gardening year and the good fortune that had come their way.
During their rollercoaster courtship and prolonged exile from each other, Dorothy returned time and again to the poignant question, ‘shall wee ever bee soe happy?’ – as happy as they longed to be. She assured William it was just the intensity of her love that made her fearful: ‘I love you more than Ever, and tis that only gives mee these dispaireing thoughts.’ But in hindsight there are two answers to her question. Yes – because against all the odds they did marry at last, and there could be no more satisfactory consummation than that. And yet no, too – because contemplating their lives together, as they did, as an epic romance that could only end with twin souls transmuted into one, would always be a happier state than the reality of the world.
Through letters and memoirs their words draw us into their lives and illuminate the extraordinary times in which they lived: ‘Read my heart,’ Dorothy wrote as she laid her hopes before him and William too claimed his writing to her was ‘a vent for [my feelings] and shewd you a heart wch you have so wholly taken up’. Their clear voices tell us the story of that grand romance of thwarted passion, conniving families, ridiculous acquaintances, disease and disappointments, together with major political achievements and the fulfilment of love – all lived out in an age of revolution.*
* The first performance was given in 1966 at Goldsmith’s Hall, London, with the mezzo-soprano Janet Baker singing as Dorothy with the refrain ‘Shall we ever be so happy?’
* I hope my use of footnotes in the pages that follow will illuminate rather than distract from the story. There are so many fascinating bit players on this stage I could not allow them to crowd the narrative in their full distinction but equally was loath to let them pass without note.
Can There Bee a More Romance Story Than Ours?
All Letters mee thinks should bee free and Easy as ones discourse not studdyed, as an Oration, nor made up of hard words like a Charme
DOROTHY OSBORNE [to William Temple, September 1653]
as those Romances are best whch are likest true storys, so are those true storys wch are likest Romances
WILLIAM TEMPLE [to Dorothy Osborne, c.1648–50]
THE ROMANCE BEGAN in the dismal year of 1648. It was much wetter than usual with an English summer full of rain. The crops were spoiled, the animals sickened ‘and Cattell died of a Murrain everywhere’.1 The human population had fared no better. The heritage of Elizabeth I’s reign had been eighty years of peace, the longest such period since the departure of the Romans over twelve centuries before. After this, the outbreak of civil war in 1642 had come as a severe shock. Few had remained unscathed. By the time the crops failed in 1648, the first hostilities of the civil war were over but the bitterness remained. The nightmare of this domestic kind of war was its indistinct firing lines and the fact the enemy was not an alien but a neighbour, brother or friend. The rift lines were complex and deep. Old rivalries and new opportunism added to the murderous confusion of civil war. Waged in the name of opposing interests and ideologies, the pitiful destruction and its bitter aftermath were acted out on the village greens and town squares, in the demesnes of castles and the courtyards of great country houses.
One of the many displaced by war was the young woman, Dorothy Osborne. She was twenty-one and in peaceful times would have been cloistered on her family’s estate in deepest Bedfordshire awaiting an arranged marriage with some eligible minor nobleman or moneyed squire. Instead, she was on the road with her brother Robin, clinging to her seat in a carriage, lurching on the rutted track leading southwards on the first leg of a journey to St Malo in France, where her father waited in exile. Low-spirited, disturbed by the catastrophes that had befallen her family, Dorothy could not know that the adventure was about to begin that would transform her life.
Dorothy’s family, the Osbornes of Chicksands Priory near Bedford, was just one of the many whose lives and fortunes were shaken and dispersed by this war. At its head was Sir Peter Osborne, a cavalier gentleman who had unhesitatingly thrown in his lot with the king when he raised his standard at Nottingham in August 1642. Charles’s challenge to parliament heralded the greatest political and social turmoil in his islands’ history. And Sir Peter, along with the majority of the aristocracy and landed gentry, took up the royalist cause; in the process he was to lose most of what he held dear.
Dorothy was the youngest of the Osborne children, a dark-haired young woman with sorrowful eyes that belied her sharp and witty mind. When war first broke out in 1642 she was barely fifteen and her girlhood from then on was spent, not at home in suspended animation, but caught up in her father’s struggles abroad or as a reluctant guest in other people’s houses. After the rout of the royalist armies in the first civil war, the Osborne estate at Chicksands was sequestered: the family dispossessed was forced to rely on the uncertain hospitality of a series of relations. Being the beggars among family and friends left Dorothy with a defensive pride, ‘for feare of being Pittyed, which of all things I hate’.2
By 1648 two of her surviving four brothers had been killed in the fighting, and circumstances had robbed her of her youthful optimism. Her father had long been absent in Guernsey. He had been suggested as lieutenant governor for the island by his powerful brother-in-law Henry Danvers, Earl of Danby, who had been awarded the governorship for life. To be a royalist lieutenant governor of an island that had declared for the parliamentarians was a bitter fate and Sir Peter and his garrison ended up in a prolonged siege in the harbour fortress of Castle Cornet, abandoned by the royalist high command to face sickness and starvation. Dorothy, along with her mother and remaining brothers, was actively involved in her father’s