Jane Dunn - Read My Heart - Dorothy Osborne and Sir William Temple, A Love Story in the Age of Revolution

Dorothy later, agreeing with Martha that William’s hair was a crowning glory, complained that he barely bothered to brush it: ‘You are soe necgligent on’t and keep it soe ill tis pitty you should have it.’ 12 It was an illuminating glimpse of a naturally handsome man who nevertheless seemed to lack personal vanity of this kind.

All his life William Temple was to find the countryside more congenial than the town, gardening and family life more sympathetic than the sophistic toils of court. He had a highly developed sense of smell and a love of the sweet scent of earth, fresh air and fruit straight from the tree. When he first arrived in Kent as a boy he had left behind his early life in the biggest and smelliest city of them all. He found Dr Hammond living in the parsonage house that he had recently refurbished, ‘repaired with very great expense (the annual charge of £100) … till from an incommodius ruin, he had rendered it a fair and pleasant dwelling’. 13 The garden was also replanted and the orchards restored.

The adult William’s delight in his own home life, his garden and simple things was nurtured when he was a boy in the care of his uncle. Dr Hammond’s biographer noted the scholar’s abstemiousness: ‘his diet was of the plainest meats … Sauces he scarce ever tasted of … In the time of his full and more vigorous health he seldom did eat or drink more than once every twenty-four hours.’ 14 Although of a much more sensual nature, William was influenced by the simplicity of his life at Penshurst and, as his sister Martha noticed later, he would rather eat at home than out, and when at home, ‘of as little as he thought fit for his company: alwayes of the plainest meats but the best chosen, & commonly din’d himselfe of ye first dish or whatever stood next him, & said he was made for a farmer & not a courtier, & understood being a shepheard & a gardener better than an Ambassador’. 15 He did however indulge all his life in good wine, even when in his later years it cruelly exacerbated his gout.

With the advantages of experience and hindsight, William wrote his recipe for the social education of a young gentleman, with some recognition of what the Hammond household offered him when a boy: ‘The best rules to form a young man: to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one’s own opinions, and value others that deserve it.’ 16

Apart from learning by example about general hospitality towards others, modest conduct and the necessity for altruism in one’s actions in the world, William was also set to study more conventional subjects. Dr Hammond’s wide learning ranged over Greek and Latin, Hebrew (William doodled the Hebrew alphabet in one of his essay books), philosophy and the natural sciences, rhetoric, divinity and literature both ancient and modern. He had an extraordinary fluency in writing, starting on his elegantly argued sermons often as late as the early morning of the Sunday he was to preach and writing pages of well-reasoned and original prose straight off, quoting copiously and often rather creatively from memory. Hammond hated idleness, and never slept more than four or five hours a night, going to bed at midnight and rising before dawn. He filled his days with study, prayer and tireless pastoral care, visiting the sick and dying even while they had highly infectious diseases such as smallpox. No moment was wasted; even the everyday necessities of dressing and undressing were achieved with a book propped open beside him.

Although young William was a boy of ability and tremendous charm, inevitably his lack of superhuman dedication to study and denial of the senses were to be a disappointment to his uncle. This sporty boy loved tennis and outdoor pursuits. As he entered middle age, his sister reported he ‘grew lazy’ though all his life he had practised the ideal of effortless brilliance, ‘it had bin observed to be part of his character never to seem busy in his greatest imployments’. Like his uncle, and indeed his father, he showed little concern for material fortune and was disinclined to do anything he did not value merely to earn a living: ‘[he] was such a lover of liberty yt I remember when he was young, & his fortunes low, to have heard him say he would not be obliged for five hundred pounds a year to step every day over a Gutter yt was in ye street before his door’. 17

Certainly Dr Hammond managed to inculcate Greek and Latin into his nephew and William learned to write philosophical essays in the most pleasing and mellifluous style. All those sermons he had to sit through found some expression in his youthful exhortatory works in which he built up great rhetorical pyramids musing on subjects such as hope and the vagaries of fortune. William was fortunate indeed to have Dr Hammond as his tutor, for this was a man of great gentleness and tolerance, even in the face of his pupil’s lack of application or lapses of concentration. The good doctor was well known for living by his claim that ‘he delighted to be loved, not reverenced’. 18

In his friends’ view Henry Hammond was saintly, self-sacrificing and preternaturally meek; even if only half true it meant that a lively, attractive boy like William had a great deal of freedom and much kindness and affection from both his uncle and his Hammond grandmother, herself the daughter of a religious scholar. He did not have to endure the harsh regimes that characterised the upbringing of most of his contemporaries, where an absolute obliviousness to the emotional or psychological welfare of the individual child meant a schooling enforced by fear and flogging.

It was widely accepted by parents and teachers alike that educating young children, the males particularly, was akin to breaking horses – in the old-fashioned way by cracking whips not whispering. John Aubrey, an exact contemporary of both William and Dorothy, felt keenly the lack of parental sympathy and understanding in his own youth, a condition that he considered the norm in the first half of the seventeenth century: ‘The Gentry and the Citizens had little learning of any kind, and their way of breeding up their children was suitable to the rest: for whereas ones child should be ones nearest Friend, and the time of growing-up should be most indulged, they were as severe to their children as their schoolmaster; and their Scoolmasters, [were as severe] as masters of the House of correction [a prison charged with reforming prisoners]. The child perfectly loathed the sight of his parents, as the slave his torturer.’ 19

By this time the Renaissance ideal of education was degraded, with classics reduced to the drudgery of learning everything by rote and it was accepted that Latin and Greek, for instance, had to be whipped into a boy. The contemporary schoolmaster and writer Henry Peacham, * in his book on etiquette for the upper classes, described with resignation the cruelties that most educators believed had to be inflicted on boys in order to turn them into scholars: ‘pulled by the ears, lashed over the face, beaten about the head with the great end of the rod, smitten upon the lips for every slight offence with the ferula’. 20

In marked contrast William Temple’s boyhood education was almost exclusively in the benign company of an uncle who could not bring himself even to raise his voice in anger and sought instead to teach by encouragement and example. Henry Hammond’s friend and colleague Dr Fell seemed to approve of this pacifist approach to teaching: ‘his little phrase, “Don’t be simple,” had more power to charm a passion than long harangues from others.’ 21

When the boy William wasn’t sitting over his books or being coaxed to a love of study, he was free to explore the gardens and grounds of the estate, etching still deeper his natural affinity with the rural life. When a father himself, William replicated these early experiences in the freedom he allowed his own children and the affectionate indulgence with which he treated them. In one of his later essays he wrote that despite choosing personal liberty always over material gain, matters of the heart were of even greater priority, ‘yet to please a mistress, save a beloved child, serve his country or friend, [this man] will sacrifice all the ease of his life, nay his blood and life too, upon occasion’. 22