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

Чтение книги онлайн.

       CHAPTER THREE

       When William Was Young

      When I was young and in some idle company, it was proposed that every one should tell what their three wishes should be, if they were sure to be granted: some were very pleasant, and some very extravagant; mine were health, and peace, and fair weather

      WILLIAM TEMPLE, essay, ‘Of Health and Long Life’

      WILLIAM TEMPLE WAS born into a family of clever and robust country gentlemen who showed an independence of mind and political fleetness of foot in navigating the quicksand of allegiances during the middle of the seventeenth century. Not for them the self-sacrifice and dogged certainties of a Sir Peter Osborne. More intellectually curious perhaps, more pragmatic than idealistic, they served both king and parliament, and managed to promote their careers despite the reversals of civil war, establishment of a new republic and restoration of a king.

William’s nephew Henry Temple, 1st viscount Palmerston, believed that the family was descended from the eleventh century magnate Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and Lady Godiva who, tradition had it, rode naked through Coventry to force her husband to revoke his oppressive taxation. More certain, and closer in time, was that William’s grandfather, after whom he was named, was the Sir William Temple who became provost of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1609. He was born in 1555 in a time of turmoil and suspicion at the end of Mary Tudor’s reign. The younger son of a younger son, he had to earn his own living. He flowered with the Elizabethan age and was a close friend and then secretary to the soldier poet Sir Philip Sidney.^* When both were in their early thirties, he followed Sidney to the Netherlands when he was made governor of Flushing: family lore had it that Sir William then held Sidney in his arms as he died of infection from a war wound in 1586.

From being the intimate of one young Orpheus, Temple now allied himself with an Icarus. He became secretary to Elizabeth I’s ambitious favourite the Earl of Essex.^† When Essex was executed in 1601 for plotting against the queen, Temple temporarily lost favour but Elizabeth had only two more years to live. He had spent almost a whole lifetime as an Elizabethan, but was to survive through two more kings’ reigns. His post as provost of Trinity was awarded under James I, as was his knighthood in 1622; he then died in 1627, the year of Dorothy’s birth and two years into the reign of Charles I.

Sir William’s intellectual and independent qualities of mind had been a large part of his attraction to Sir Philip Sidney. Educated at Eton, Temple had won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where he quickly showed an aptitude for philosophical debate. Controversially he there became a passionate advocate of the philosopher Ramus^‡ against the then orthodoxy of medieval scholasticism, with its highly convoluted definitions and terminology. Ramus had made a widely influential case for clarity, distinctness and analysis of all kinds, a systematisation of knowledge which turned out to be much easier to carry through in the new print culture. Temple’s annotated edition of Ramus’s Dialectics, arguing for a simplified system of logic, was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. It had the distinction of probably being the first book published by the Cambridge University Press in 1584. According to his granddaughter, William’s sister Martha, this was ‘writ … as I have bin told in the most elegant Latin any body has bin Master off’.¹

      Sir William became provost of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1609 and was active in transforming the college and university so that it more resembled Cambridge. He was a lively presence around Dublin and was elected to the Irish House of Commons in 1613 as a member for the university. He was knighted rather late in his career and died five years later aged seventy-two and still in office. He had died in harness, although his resignation had already been mooted owing to ‘his age and weakness’.² His granddaughter noted that he died as he had lived, with a certain blitheness and a concern with learning, ‘with little care or thought of his fortune’,³ and so had only a modest estate to pass on to his heir.

Sir William Temple’s elder son, Sir John Temple, was our William’s father. The family’s friendship with the family of the Earl of Essex continued through the next two generations. Sir John too had a distinguished career, as member of both the Irish and English parliaments and, most significantly, as Master of the Rolls^* in Ireland. Born there in СКАЧАТЬ