Madam
I count all that time but lost which I liv’d without knowing you … Tis impossible to tell you how often I have died since I left you, for I have done it as often as I have thought of you, and thought of you as often as I have breath’d; you thinke it strange that I am dead and yet have motion enough to write, alas (Madam) though I am dead, my passion lives, and tis that now writes to you, not I; have I not often told you that would never dye? And as often I could never outlive the losse of your sight; you at first thought them winde like other words, and they would soone blow over, but learne (Madam) a lovers heart is allwayes at his mouth when his Mistresse is neere him … for all this[,] dead as I am[,] if my hopes are not so too, and there are any of seeing you, methinks your eyes would revive mee … Let me know by your letters you remember mee, if you would not have mee dye beyond all hopes of a resurrection.30
In writing these personalised romances for Dorothy, William was also setting himself up in competition with the French writers she so much esteemed. Throughout their courtship she urged the turgid volumes upon him, begging him to read them too so that she could discuss character and motivation with him. Here he was attempting a pre-emptive strike, hoping perhaps that she would rate his work as highly as theirs, or at least see him in an enhanced light. His romances also pursued certain philosophical and moral arguments that suggest something of their youthful discussions, as well as the surge of emotion that overcame them both during their transfiguring month in St Malo.
In speaking of the hero of one of his stories, William amplified his country pursuits into allegories on life itself. Here he appears to acknowledge that his newfound love also brought danger; the greater the ecstasy the more painful the loss. In love, he was now no longer safe and self-contained and his carefree days were over:
sometimes he flies the tender partridge, others the soaring hearne [heron] and his hawkes never missing, hee concludes that fly wee high or low wee must all at length come alike to the ground; if there bee any difference that the loftier flight has the deadlier fall. sometimes with his angle hee beguiles the silly fish, and not without some pitty of theire innocence, observes how theire pleasure proves theire bane and how greedily they swallow the baite wch covers a hooke that shall teare out theire bowels, hee compares lovers to these little wittlesse creatures, and thinks them the fonder [more foolish] of the two, that with such greedy eyes stand gazing at a face, whose beguiling regards will pierce into theire hearts, and cost them theire freedome and content if they scape with theire lives.31
The face he had gazed on he described thus: ‘her eyes black as the night seem’d to presage the fate of all such as beheld them. Her browne haire curl’d in rings, but indeed they were chaines that enslav’d all hearts that were so bold as to approach them.’32 There is no doubt that he was pointedly describing Dorothy, from whom he was exiled at the time. During the six and a half years of their separation she was indeed circled by suitors bold enough to approach her. She was pressed by her father, and then more threateningly by her brother, to accept anyone with a suitable fortune, but she withstood the emotional blackmail, deprecating each suitor to William with a sharp wit and dispatching them all with unsentimental glee. But her position was parlous. For most of their courtship, Dorothy was secluded in her family’s country house, not knowing whether William would remain loyal or that either of them could continue to resist the family pressure on them to conform. At times their spirits and hope failed them. Illness, depression and threats of death made their ugly interjections. There could never be any certainty until their struggle had run its course.
Somehow, through personal tragedy, family blackmail, enforced separation, misunderstandings, ridicule and despair, Dorothy and William clung against all the odds to a sometimes faltering faith in each other and in the triumph of romantic love. For a young couple to maintain their fidelity to an ideal of a self-determined life, no matter what outrage, arguments and threats were marshalled against them, merely compounded in the eyes of the world their disrespect and folly. For Dorothy Osborne and William Temple to remain constant to each other and overcome every obstacle, from when they first met in 1648 through to their eventual, longed-for consummation at Christmas 1654, was remarkable indeed. Dorothy wrote to him in the midst of their trials: ‘can there bee a more Romance Story than ours would make if the conclusion should prove happy[?]’33 but it seemed the vainest hope.
* Lady Halkett (1623–99) was born Anne Murray, her father a tutor to Charles I and then provost of Eton College. He died when she was a baby and her remarkable mother became governess to the royal children. Anne was a highly intelligent and spirited young woman and after a wild and adventurous life as the assistant to a secret agent employed by Charles I she eventually married a widower, Sir James Halkett, at the late age of thirty-three. After the death of her husband she became a teacher herself.
* Robert Hammond (1621–54), a distinguished parliamentarian soldier and friend of Cromwell, nephew of the royalist divine Dr Henry Hammond, chaplain to the king, and cousin to William Temple. Sent by Cromwell to Ireland as a member of the Irish council responsible for reorganising the judiciary, he caught a fever and died at the age of thirty-three.
† Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria (1614–62), governor of the Spanish Netherlands and art collector. His collection is now part of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
* Ovid’s Metamorphoses, viii, 620–724. Philemon’s name connoted love and that of his wife Baucis modesty. Dorothy had identified closely with the old couple who had been wedded in their youth and lived in contented poverty, growing older and ever closer. For their simple kindness and hospitality to the gods Jupiter and Mercury, who were travelling incognito and had been denied succour at every other door, they were rewarded with a temple in place of their cottage and transformed into priests and granted their only request: that having lived so long together in close companionship they might be allowed to die together. As death approached, they both transmuted into trees, Philemon an oak and Baucis a linden tree, their trunks and branches so closely intertwined they were as one. Dorothy’s own signed copy of the 1626 edition of Sandys’s translation of Ovid is now in the Osborn collection in the Beinecke Library at Yale.
* They both used the word ‘friend’ to mean also a close family member, most notably a spouse.
* William Temple adapted his series of romances from François de Rosset’s Histoires Tragiques, a collection of nineteen versions of true stories that were collected and published in 1615 with many further editions. William’s additions and departures from the original were expressive of his more sympathetic nature and philosophical mind, as well as outlets for frustrated feeling. Most significantly, however, they were personal messages to the woman for whom he was writing.
I felt this is the heart of England … history I felt; Cromwell; The Osbornes; Dorothy’s shepherdesses singing … the unconscious breathing of England
VIRGINIA WOOLF, watching a country wedding, Diary,
22 September 1928
DOROTHY’S DETERMINATION TO direct her own fate and modify her central role as dutiful daughter and marriage pawn was highly unusual for the time. The kind of