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

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СКАЧАТЬ of their husbands or spiritual guides, read good books, pray often and speak little, and “learn to do good works for necessary uses”, for by that phrase St. Paul expresses the obligation of Christian women to good housewifery and charitable provisions for their family and neighbourhood.’¹⁹

      Chicksands Priory housed not only the Osborne family but also their servants with whom they lived closely. The real wealth of the estate consisted in about 800 acres of arable land, a similar amount of pasture providing grazing for sheep and cattle. There was a similar acreage again of woodland, with all the essential resources that provided building and fencing materials, firewood, cover for game and protection from the wind and the worst of the weather. On top of this was a further acreage of uncultivated heathland. Chicksands estate also housed its tenant farmers and estate workers in some forty different houses. There were two water mills to grind the corn they harvested. Vegetables and fruit, meat, milk, flour, all would have been produced for the substantial community who relied on the Osborne family and their land for their livelihoods.

      Before the civil wars and the depredations on his fortunes, together with the swingeing fines that followed, Sir Peter Osborne’s annual income was £4,000 a year, the equivalent today of just under half a million. Life was lived in the raw, the poor and sick alongside the well-off and hearty, the yeoman workers and tradesmen amid the leisured classes of gentry and aristocracy. On a country estate everything was on an intimate scale, the people living close to the earth and its seasons: deer were hunted, wild animals trapped and domestic beasts slaughtered and butchered on site; the mentally ill or retarded were absorbed in the family and the larger community; babies were born in equal travail and danger, be it in the big house or the hovel; people suffered and died at home while all around them life went on.

      The Duchess of Newcastle, a contemporary of Dorothy’s, remembered being a sensitive child who shrank from the extremes of life and death that assailed her sensibilities on her parents’ estate in Essex. She refused to join the other ladies of quality who crowded round a hunted deer as it was killed ‘that they might wash their hands in the blood, supposing it will make them white’ and, unusually for her time, honoured the life in all creatures: ‘it troubles my conscience to kill a fly, and the groans of a dying beast strike my soul.’²⁰

      Dorothy Osborne owned up to a similar liveliness of imagination and fellow feeling: ‘Nothing is soe great a Violence to mee, as that which moves my compasson[.] I can resist with Ease any sort of People but beggers. If this bee a fault in mee, tis at least a well natured one, and therefore I hope you will forgive it mee.’²¹ Growing up at Chicksands, Dorothy’s days had a rhythm and regularity dictated by the seasons and interrupted only by the visits of family and friends. Journeys were difficult and lengthy and young unmarried women could not undertake them on their own, so Dorothy usually had to wait until an obliging member of her large extended family could accompany her. In one of her later letters to William, Dorothy described in detail the pattern of her daily life. She happened to choose a June day in 1653 when she was twenty-six but, as she made clear, the pattern of rural life remained essentially unaltered through the years: it is reasonable to believe it was a sketch of many summer days at Chicksands when she was still a girl. It is this famous passage that Virginia Woolf recalled when she gazed on that country wedding in 1928.

      You ask mee how I passe my time heer, I can give you a perfect accounte not only of what I doe for the present, but what I am likely to do this seven yeare if I only stay heer soe long. I rise in the morning reasonably Early, and before I am redy I goe rounde the house til I am weary of that, and then into the garden till it grows to[o] hott for mee. About ten a clock I think of making mee redy, and when that’s don I goe into my fathers Chamber, from thence to dinner, where my cousin [Henry] Molle and I sitt in great State, in a Roome & at a table that would hold a great many more. After dinner wee sit and talk till Mr B [Levinus Bennet, Sheriff of Cambridgeshire] com’s in question and then I am gon. The heat of the day is spent in reading or working [needlework] and about sixe or seven a Clock, I walke out into a Common that lyes hard by the house where a great many young wenches keep Sheep and Cow’s and sitt in the shade singing of Ballads; I goe to them and compare theire voices and Beauty’s to some Ancient Shepherdesses that I have read of and finde a vast difference there, but trust mee I think these are as innocent as those could bee. I talke to them and finde they want nothing to make them the happiest People in the world, but the Knoledge that they are soe. Most Comonly when wee are in the middest of our discourse one looks aboute her and spyes her Cow’s goeing into the Corne and then away they all run, as if they had wing’s at theire heels. I that am not soe nimble stay behinde, & when I see them driving home theire Cattle I think tis time for mee to retyre too. When I have supped I goe into the Garden and soe to the side of a small River that runs by it where I sitt downe and wish you with me.²²

      Under the brilliance of this evocation of the centuries-old pattern of country life and the idyll of an English summer day lay a sense of personal frustration. While the herd girls were unaware, Dorothy believed, of the sublime simplicity of their lives she, the young unmarried daughter of the estate, was over-conscious of her own youth idled away while she waited on the will of others. She was richer, better educated and living in greater comfort than the girls minding the cattle, yet she had to look to marriage for purpose in her life and seemed in part to envy the useful and natural freedom of their days. Where she was solitary they had comradeship; where she was weighed down with her heavy seventeenth-century dress, its tight bodice and bulky petticoats and all the expectations laid upon a lady of quality, they were less encumbered, sprightly and carefree. In reality the lives of these country girls were hard and narrow, and winter would have made their labour much less enviable, but Dorothy’s reaction to their lively conversation and the simplicity of their working lives, making them ‘the happiest People in the world’, revealed the feeling that her own life lacked autonomy and purpose.

The civil war that began in 1642 only destroyed for a while this ordered rural life, but the Osbornes’ easy prosperity was gone for ever. The effects on the family were catastrophic but commonplace. Two of Dorothy’s brothers died in action fighting for the king; Henry, lieutenant colonel of foot, at the Battle of Naseby in 1645 when he was thirty-one and Charles, only seven years older than Dorothy, also lieutenant colonel of foot, was killed at Hartland in Devon the following year when he was twenty-six. The depredations went deep and wide: her father’s annual income was reduced by 90 per cent to £400 per annum;^* both parents were prematurely aged by the hazards and relentless strain of their circumstances, and Dorothy herself, temporarily at least, lost her belief in a benign world. But along with the destruction and suffering of war also came opportunity. Civil war particularly touched everyone and it affected Dorothy’s life as deeply as any. Most significantly, it interrupted the rural seclusion of her life, introducing her to new and at times alarming experiences, and it disrupted the marriage dance choreographed for her by the wider family.

      Dorothy’s early life had been lived against the uncertain backdrop of Charles I’s personal rule. After his relationship with a succession of parliaments had broken down over intractable financial, political and religious issues, the king had dismissed his 1629 parliament with little intention of meeting them again. He became increasingly isolated from his own people who were suspicious that his private relationships, with his Catholic wife Henrietta Maria and reckless favourite Buckingham, until his assassination in 1629, exerted a sinister influence on his public policies. After what was called the ‘Eleven Years’ Tyranny’, Charles was forced to recall parliament in 1640 and agree to a raft of concessions, limiting his power and redressing some of the grievances against him. These agreements he subsequently ignored. Having lost the trust of a thoroughly disenchanted parliament, the king withdrew from Westminster and in the summer of 1642 raised his standard at Nottingham, marking the formal start of civil war.

      Dorothy was fifteen when the country’s СКАЧАТЬ