The pragmatic approach to marrying off one’s daughters was evident in her family well before Dorothy had met William and unhelpfully set her heart on him alone. After the death of her sister Elizabeth, it was considered for a while that her brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Peyton, an excellent royalist gentleman with an estate in Kent, might then marry Dorothy. Both she and Elizabeth had been clever bookish girls with a fine writing style: to the practical and undiscerning they might have seemed interchangeable. Except Dorothy was only fifteen when her sister died and seemed already to hope for more in life than a marriage of convenience, particularly one to a widowed brother-in-law.
Whatever these inchoate plans might have been, Sir Thomas Peyton confounded them all by marrying a woman with a completely opposite temperament to the Osborne girls: Cecelia Swan, the widow of a mayor of London, was ‘of a free Jolly humor, loves cards and company and is never more pleased then when she see’s a great many Others that are soe too’. Dorothy marvelled that her brother-in-law could be such an excellent and contented husband with two such different wives. She explained to William why he briefly considered her as his next wife, and in the process continued her deft and generous character sketch of the second Lady Peyton: ‘His kindenesse to his first wife may give him an Esteem for her Sister [Dorothy herself], but hee [was] too much smitten with this Lady to think of marrying any body else, and seriously I could not blame him, for she had, and has yet, great Lovlinesse in her, she was very handsom and is very good, one may read it in her face at first sight.’45
Her most eminent suitor, and her most surprising given she was of such loyal royalist stock, was Henry Cromwell,* fourth son of Oliver Cromwell, soon to be lord protector. There is no indication as to how these two young people met and their unlikely friendship is a tantalising one. Henry was an exact contemporary of William’s, one year younger than Dorothy and her favourite suitor among the also-rans. He lacked William’s romantic good looks but was a thoroughly amiable, intelligent and capable young man: while William was abroad playing tennis, perfecting his French and pining for love, Henry was in the thick of battle, serving under his father during the latter part of the civil wars.
Dorothy remained friends with him even after their courtship came to nothing and he had married another. She shared with him a love of Irish greyhounds and already owned a bitch he had given her that had belonged to his father. Unlike other ladies of her acquaintance, she eschewed lap dogs for the grandeur of really big breeds and had asked Henry Cromwell to send her from Ireland a male dog, ‘the biggest hee can meet with, ’tis all the beauty of those dogs or of any indeed I think, a Masty [mastiff] is handsomer to mee then the most exact little dog that ever Lady playde withall’.46 When no hound was forthcoming she transferred the request through William to his father Sir John Temple, when he was next in Ireland. Three months later, at the end of September 1653, it was Henry Cromwell who came up with the goods: ‘I must tell you what a present I had made mee today,’ she wrote excitedly to William, ‘two [of] the finest Young Ireish Greyhounds that ere I saw, a Gentelman that serv’s the Generall [Oliver Cromwell] sent them mee they are newly come over and sent for by H. C.’47
Rivalry over which suitor could provide the best dog may have spurred William on to entreat his father to send a dog from Ireland, as previously requested, or in fact he may have sent his own hound to stay with Dorothy at Chicksands when he himself set out for Ireland the following spring, but a Temple greyhound did arrive at Chicksands to compete for Dorothy’s attention with the Cromwell pair. In March, Dorothy wrote to William expressing her care and affection for this new dog and her efforts to protect him from the pack. It is easy to see how her relationship with this dog was used by her as a metaphor for her feelings for William, and her constant defence of him against the malice of his detractors: ‘Your dog is come too, and I have received him with all the Kindnesses that is due to any thinge you sende[,] have deffended him from the Envy and the Mallice of a troupe of greyhounds that used to bee in favour with mee, and hee is soe sencible of my care over him that hee is pleased with nobody else and follow’s mee as if wee had bin of longe acquaintance.’48
There is no letter from William to Dorothy that could tell us what he thought of all these human rivals when he was kept so strictly from her. His one existing letter, written later in their courtship when he had arrived in Ireland on a visit to his father, was passionate, ecstatic and extreme; he vowed he could not live without her and, in the absence of a letter, strove to reassure himself of her love. At this time, judging from her own letters in response to his, there were occasions when he lost confidence in his powers to keep her, feared he did not write such fine letters as others, or thought her less passionately committed to him than he was to her.
William’s sense of frustration at their separation and his powerlessness to effect anything was expressed in his anxiety that Dorothy should not be taken in by young men engaged merely in the pursuit of love, full of pretence and false emotion, ‘one whining in poetry, another groaning in passionate epistles or harangues … how neer it concerns young Ladys in this age to beware of abuses, not to build upon any appearance of a passion wch men learne by rote how to act, and practise almost in all companys where they come’.49 It seemed his fears were frankly and easily expressed to Dorothy and she was quick to console him with her continual longing for him and desire for his happiness: ‘if to know I wish you with mee, pleases you, tis a satisfaction you may always’s have, for I doe it perpetualy, but were it realy in my Power to make you happy, I could not misse being soe my self for I know nothing Else I want towards it.’50
He did describe, however, in one of his early essays, written during these fraught times of separation and uncertainty, the corrosive power of jealousy from what seemed to be personal experience: his style, formal here as befits an essay, would have been much more conversational had this been expressed instead in a letter to Dorothy:
Amongst all those passions wch ride mens soules none so jade and tire them out as envy and jealousy … jealousy is desperate of any cure, all thinges nourish, nothing destroyes it … where this suspicion is once planted, the fondest circumstances serve to encrease it, the clearest eveidences can never root it out; though a man beleeves it is not true yet tis enough that it might have been true … tis the madness of love, the moth of contentment, the wolfe in the brest, the gangreen of the soule the vulture of Tityus still knawing at the heart, tis the ranckest poyson growing out of the richest soile, engender’d of love, but cursed viper, teares out its mothers bowells … tis allwayes searching what it hopes never to find.51
Everything was made far worse by their enforced separation. In absence, rivals grow in the imagination, fantasies become real and love and fear of loss inflate into obsession. There was little reassurance to be had from anyone but each other and their letters assumed enormous significance. But then letters took so long to be delivered that the mood had passed by the time a reply arrived. Most were carried privately by a post boy, whose horse was changed at regular stages along the journey, or by a carrier’s wagon. The charge was based on how