Read My Heart: Dorothy Osborne And Sir William Temple

Jane Dunn

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Review

Dorothy Osborne and William Temple met on the Isle of Wight in 1648, when Charles I was imprisoned on the island in Carisbrooke Castle. Two of Dorothy’s four brothers had already been killed in the civil war and she was going to join her mother in St Malo to sell family effects to help her father who, as royalist lieutenant governor of Castle Cornet on parliamentarian Guernsey, was ruining himself in a prolonged and futile siege. Temple, whose father was parliamentarian – he was Master of the Rolls in Ireland - was leaving England for Europe, where prospects were brighter for a twenty-year-old gentleman. Divisions within each family lay deeper: William’s uncle was the king’s chaplain, while one of Dorothy’s uncles was to be a regicide.

It was a time when ‘social upheavals broke open some of the more stifling conventions of a young unmarried woman’s life.’ Dorothy was not stuck at home in Bedfordshire: she was on the road, which enabled the couple to meet and fall in love. But still the idea that young people could ‘choose whom they wanted to marry on the grounds of… love, was considered a shortcut to social anarchy, even lunacy.’ William and Dorothy understood that their fathers wanted them to repair their family fortunes in their marriages – in both cases, they amounted to about their family’s last remaining asset – and they were brought up to conform. But they kept faith through six years of political vicissitudes and implacable family hostility. On the day of her father’s burial she informed her vengeful surviving brother, Henry, that she would marry no one else but William Temple.

Their clandestine courtship is revealed in Dorothy’s magnificent letters which William, and later her family, preserved. Dorothy’s own remark, ‘Can there be a more Romance story than ours?’ seems as true now as it did to readers when they were first published in 1888. Where Dunn adds to Dorothy’s own witty, articulate testament is in showing how individual family circumstances and education shaped Dorothy and William. Although anxious to follow conventions, they were able to withstand them. Again and again Dorothy is presented with suitors whom she bats away and then gossips about in a secret letter to William. Dunn persuasively evokes how dangerous and difficult it was: they did not know that the outcome would be happy.

The book’s dynamic alters with their marriage. We’ve had the happy ending; the letters, and therefore the romantic intensity, stop: yet we aren’t even half way through. Their early married life, not surprisingly, isn’t very interesting, nor is there much information about it besides a terrible succession of pregnancies and infant deaths. The fact that William is more interested in his wife than his career doesn’t help the pace. But there is the Restoration, the Great Plague and the Fire of London, then all of a sudden William has brought about the Triple Alliance with the United Provinces and Sweden, which concluded the war with the Dutch and checked expansionist France. This achievement was soon undermined by Charles II’s double game. Although William liked the king personally, he detested his court and refused to enter politics, so that he never achieved the worldly success that others expected of him. Intuitive, emotional, clever and evidently radiant with charm, he turned his attention more and more to gardens and writing, for which he was justly celebrated. He left rights to his work to the impecunious young Jonathan Swift, who was his secretary for the last ten years of his life.

‘Read My Heart’ might have benefited from some trimming and some weeding of repetitions, but it has a rich cast of peripheral characters. Most important of these was William’s devoted sister, Martha. Others include William of Orange, whom the Temples made friends with during their years in Holland. It was on Dorothy’s recommendation that he married Mary Stuart. Although the letters between them have not survived, Dorothy’s friendship with Mary gives a fascinating glimpse of her in old age, as shrewd and engaging as ever. Vividly though she presents this world in transition, however, the foreground of Dunn’s fine book is securely occupied by her account of a remarkable marriage between two extraordinary people. She may be partial, but you can see why she likes them. And when Dorothy died in 1695, six years after the suicide of their only child to reach adulthood, William commemorated her on her tombstone by her maiden name as ‘the most intimately wedded of wives.’ - review by John de Falbe