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

In fact the most violent treatment William had to endure while in the care of his uncle was the medical treatment at the time for various common ailments: ‘I remembered the cure of chilblains, when I was a boy, (which may be called the children’s gout,) by burning at the fire, or else by scalding brine.’ He recalled too how a deep wound when he was a youth was ‘cured by scalding medicament, after it was grown so putrefied as to have (in the surgeon’s opinion) endangered the bone; and the violent swelling and bruise of another taken away as soon as I received it, by scalding it with milk’. 23

Both William and his uncle shared a love of music. Dr Hammond, particularly in the youthful period of his life when he was in loco parentis for his nephew, would accompany himself on the harpsichon, a kind of virginal, or take up his theorbo, a large double-necked bass lute, and play and sing ‘after the toil and labour of the day, and before the remaining studies of the night’. 24

The kind of music-making indulged in by William and his uncle at Penshurst was of an unexacting domestic kind, practised in the home, sometimes in the company of a few country friends. In joining in the relaxation at the end of the day by playing and listening to music, William was merely doing what most people were doing across the land, in church, court and country. Aubrey famously declared: ‘When I was a Boy every Gentleman almost kept a Harper in his house: and some of them could versifie.’ 25 For him the ‘Civill Warres’ changed everything, but informal music-making would continue regardless: Dorothy Osborne’s shepherdesses singing in the fields in summer remained just part of the rich musicality of a time when all classes of people made music domestically and turned to each other for entertainment.

This youthful interlude in a rural paradise under his uncle’s care had to come to an end. About the age of eleven, William left Penshurst and was sent to board at the grammar school at Bishop’s Stortford, a town some thirty miles from London and twenty-six from Cambridge. Despite an inevitably rude awakening to school life, this was as happy a choice as possible, for the school’s reputation and success were in rapid ascendancy under the inspired headship of Thomas Leigh. He not only set up Latin and writing schools but was also instrumental in building a library of repute, partially by insisting that every pupil donate a book as a leaving present. His regime was more tolerant and less violent than elsewhere. When he finally retired in the 1660s after a triumphant forty-seven years at the helm the school went into rapid decline, but he was still in charge while William and his younger brothers were schooled there. All his life William Temple retained his respect for Mr Leigh to whom, he was wont to say, ‘he was beholding for all he knew of Latin & Greek’. 26 His sister Martha added that he managed to retain all his Latin perfectly but regretted losing much of his Greek.

By the beginning of the 1640s William was just a teenager and still safely in school while the kingdom’s political certainties fell apart. For most of William’s life, Charles I had ruled without parliament, having dissolved his rebellious House of Commons, he hoped for ever, in 1629. The country had limped on under the king’s absolute rule until Scotland, always resistant to coercion, kicked back. Charles’s pig-headed insistence on imposing a Book of Common Prayer on the country of his birth brought to the fore long-held Scottish resentments against the crown. Two inflammatory passions that had so effectively driven the Scottish reformation, the hatred of foreign interference and of popery, were reignited. The eminent moderate Presbyterian Robert Baillie was shocked at the blind and murderous fury he found on the streets of his native Glasgow: ‘the whole people thinks poperie at the doores … no man may speak any thing in publick for the king’s part, except he would have himself marked for a sacrifice to be killed one day. I think our people possessed with a bloody devill, far above any thing that ever I could have imagined.’ 27

Equally blind in his anger and faced with approaching war, Charles refused to capitulate. His inability to finance any sustained war forced him to recall in 1640 what became known as the Short Parliament. The members, given eloquent voice by John Pym, were too full of grievances over the misrule of the last eleven years to be in any mood to cooperate with the king’s demands, and Charles was in no mood to make amends. Within three weeks he dissolved this parliament. Barely six months later, his authority fatally undermined, forced to surrender to the Scottish terms and cripplingly short of money, the king had little recourse but to recall parliament for a second time. The sitting that began in November 1640 became known as the Long Parliament, hailed as a triumph for the people.

Sitting simultaneously to both Short and Long Parliaments was the convocation of divines, one of whom was William’s uncle Dr Hammond. With the introduction of seventeen new canons of ecclesiastical law, Charles intended to have his clergy insist from the pulpit on the power of monarchy. He also sought to make the subject matter and rituals of church service conform to a model that was anathema to the growing Puritan element among his clergy, with the altar being railed off, for instance. As a loyal supporter of the king, Dr Hammond was in the minority in this gathering. With parliament and king increasingly polarised and military action looming, Dr Hammond’s uncompromising position made him vulnerable. By 1643, in the middle of the first civil war, his vicarage was sacked and he was forced to flee his parish to seek refuge in Oxford, the new headquarters for the king, where he was later kept under house arrest himself. Although he was to become Charles’s personal chaplain in his various confinements, including for a while his imprisonment at Carisbrooke Castle, the place to which Hammond longed to return was his parish at Penshurst: ‘the necessity to leave his flock … was that which did most affect him of any that he felt in his whole life’. 28

It was a measure of the depth of ideological passions and the widespread effects of the political hostilities at the time that even such a naturally pacifist scholar as Henry Hammond, ministering to a country parish far away from the centres of political and ecclesiastical power, should have his daily life completely disrupted, his own life, even, threatened. He was never able to take up his living again at Penshurst but continued to write with all the fluency he had shown when young, sheltered by various friends and admirers, and enduring with unflagging patience the agony of kidney stones and gout that afflicted him in middle age. He died aged fifty-four of kidney failure in 1660, just as his old patron’s son was restored to the throne.

William’s father too suffered a reversal of fortune that reverberated in his son’s life. Sir John Temple had been a member of Charles I’s forces riding north in 1639 to confront the rebellious Scots. The following year he was rewarded with the position of Master of the Rolls in Ireland, one of the most senior appointments in the Irish chancery, and he left England to assume his responsibilities. His good fortune was not to last long, however, for in October 1641 he was in the thick of the Irish rebellion (or massacre as it was called by contemporaries). Deeply held resentments over the plantation policies of both James I and Charles I, encouraging Protestant settlers from England and Scotland, finally erupted in anarchic and bloody violence. The Irish Catholics joined forces with the equally disaffected Anglo-Norman ‘Old English’ aristocracy in an attempt to drive out the Protestants. Although the numbers killed are still open to dispute, there is little doubt that thousands of settlers were murdered, their farms burned, their families dispossessed. Rumour of inhuman atrocities spread like wildfire throughout England and Scotland, reviving fears of a popish conspiracy. With Charles’s situation so parlous at home, his cause was damaged further by the suspicions that he too was complicit in the conspiracy.