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

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СКАЧАТЬ on the child of suckling from a woman other than its own mother: ‘we are often astonished that the children of virtuous women do not resemble their parents, either physically or morally. It is not without reason that the fable, known even to children, arose that he who was nurtured with the milk of a sow has rolled in the mire.’¹¹

By Vives’s standards the woman who was chosen to feed the youngest Osborne must have had not only a talent for childcare, for Dorothy survived infancy,^* but also moral and intellectual qualities of some distinction. By the time her father returned from Guernsey, Dorothy would have been weaned and begun to take her place in the family. Despite the eight sons already born to her mother and father, it was still customary to deplore the birth of a girl. Give me sons and yet more sons was the usual cry from both men and women. Letters and journals of the time were full of fathers’ disappointments and mothers’ apologies for failing to provide the family with another boy. Lady Anne d’Ewes wrote to her absent husband, already the father of sons, making the best of their disappointment, ‘though we have failed in part of our hope by the birth of a daughter, yet we are freed from much care and fear a son would have brought.’¹²

      Dorothy does not write directly of her early education but there was no doubt from her letters that she was wonderfully expressive in her own language and reasonably fluent in French. She had a sophisticated and unusually direct writing style that was highly valued by William Temple and his sister, and other contemporaries lucky enough to receive them. Dorothy was sharply intelligent and perceptive with a strong will and mischievous wit. A keen reader, she knew her classical authors, was particularly fond of Ovid, and devoured contemporary French novels of interminable length so enthusiastically that she even bothered to reread some of them in English, commenting unfavourably on the quality of the translations.

      It is most likely that her education was mostly at home at Chicksands and then, with the political upheavals of civil war, possibly for a time in Guernsey with her father, and later in France. It was usual for a daughter in her position at the end of a big family and very close in age to the brother above her to be educated initially with him, sharing some lessons at least. In the case of the Osborne family, home education of the previous generation was conducted by the local curate, as was the case for their uncle Francis growing up at Chicksands some two decades earlier. A cynical man who felt he had not fulfilled his promise, he blamed his home education for his lack of skills necessary to progress in a self-serving world. School learning, on the other hand, he believed, would have instilled the duplicity and opportunism necessary for success.

      Personal ambition and independence of mind were reckoned absolutely undesirable, even a sign of madness, in a girl growing up in the early seventeenth century. The remarkable flowering of English women’s education among the elite had been a temporary phenomenon of the mid-sixteenth century and was now over. For a while, Sir Thomas More’s famous statement, ‘I do not see why learning … may not equally agree with both sexes,’¹³ was put into triumphant practice by a number of noblewomen of the time. Elizabeth I and the daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke (who united their brilliance with the Cecil and Bacon families) were shining examples of this efflorescence. However, by the time Dorothy was a girl the rising tide of Puritanism stressed a more obedient and domestic role for women. Certainly daughters of the gentry were taught to read and write. Fluency in French was also considered a useful refinement for a lady. But equally important was learning the social arts of music, dancing, drawing and embroidery. There is lasting evidence that Dorothy excelled at the last, for a beautiful silk coverlet finely embroidered by her with a variety of animals and insects, birds and flowers still exists in her family’s keeping.

A contemporary of Dorothy’s, Anne, Lady Fanshawe, had a broadly similar structure to her life^* and described in her memoirs her early education in the country and frustration at learning the womanly arts when she longed to be living an active life: ‘[it] was with all the advantages that time afforded, both for working all sorts of fine works with my needle, and learning French, singing, lute, the virginals, and dancing; and, not withstanding I learned as well as most did, yet was I wild to that degree that the houres of my beloved recreation took up too much of my time, for I loved riding in the first place, and running, and all acteive pastimes; and in fine I was that which we graver people call a hoyting girle.’¹⁴

However, all these social graces were only the gloss on a seventeenth-century gentlewoman’s education, for at the heart of her moral and intellectual schooling was religion. This and a due respect for the authority of her parents was the structure by which she was expected to live her life. The mother of Margaret Lucas, who later as the Duchess of Newcastle^† became notorious for her lack of self-effacement, laid on tutors for her daughter in all the basic ladylike skills, but Margaret reckoned they were more for ‘formality than benefit’ and consequently ‘we were not kept strictly thereto, for my mother cared not so much for our dancing and fiddling, singing and prating of several languages, as that we should be bred virtuously, modestly, civilly, honourably, and on honest principles’.¹⁵

      Another daughter of a royalist family, Lady Halkett, recalled the emphasis put on her religious education under the eye of an intellectual mother. Each day began and ended with prayer and devotional reading, usually of the Bible, and the local church was a regular meeting-place for worship and for instruction: ‘for many yeares together I was seldome or never absent from devine service att five a clocke in the morning in the summer and sixe a clock in winter.’¹⁶ This routine continued until the Puritan ascendancy during the commonwealth discouraged displays of public worship.

Religion played more a pragmatic than a spiritual role in the average young woman’s life by setting and enforcing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. It provided the moral framework to an individual life and the badge of identity for the extended family. As Sir George Savile^* explained to his daughter, her education very much in mind: ‘Religion is exalted reason, refined and sifted from the grosser parts of it … it is both the foundation and the crown of all virtues … It cleanseth the understanding, and brusheth off the earth that hangeth about our souls.’¹⁷ He also thought it better if young women remained loyal to the religion they were brought up in as it was ill-advised for a girl to trouble her head with religious debate, ‘in respect that the voluminous inquiries into the truth, by reading, are less expected from [your sex]’.¹⁸

      Dorothy was brought up to be the ideal daughter with an unquestioning belief in God and acceptance of His will and, by extension, the authority and dictates of her family. Growing up just before the cataclysmic upheavals of the civil wars, she was the youngest child in a comfortably off patriarchal family. There was a well-ordered pattern to life and a narrow range of choices for her future. The quality and horizons of her adult life depended on two things above all else: the nature, status and financial means of the man she would marry; and her health, for few women escaped their destiny of multiple childbirth and untreatable diseases that could only be left to run their course.

The influential religious writer Jeremy Taylor,^* whom Dorothy considered her spiritual mentor, offered his tolerant and practical interpretation of the scriptures by which a young woman like her could choose to live a worthwhile and pious life: ‘Let the women of noble birth and great fortunes … nurse their children, look to the affairs of the house, visit poor cottages, and relieve their СКАЧАТЬ