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

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СКАЧАТЬ was to remain at Emmanuel only for William’s first year before taking up in 1645 his new post as master of Clare Hall and regius professor of Hebrew. His magnum opus, The True Intellectual System of the Universe: the first part, wherein all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted and its impossibility demonstrated, was not published until 1678. Industrious, scholarly and prolific in his writings, Cudworth was described, memorably but probably unfairly, by Bolingbroke^* as someone who ‘read too much to think enough, and admired too much to think freely’.

      This immensely serious and learned young man had an uphill battle getting this sixteen-year-old fresher to buckle down to the finer points of theological and moral philosophy. William’s sister recalled that Cudworth ‘would have engaged [William] in the harsh studies of logick and phylosophy wch his humor was too lively to pursue’. His disposition certainly was lively, and his interests wide-ranging and not solely intellectual. Martha, his doting sister, explained what she considered the tenor of William’s life at Cambridge: ‘Entertainments (which agreed better with [his merry disposition] & his age, especially Tennis) past most of his time there, soe that he use to say, if it bin possible in the two years time he past there to forgit all he had learn’t before, he must certainely have done it.’²⁹

      This sounds like a sister’s pride in her dashing, fun-loving, older brother and she was right about his passion for tennis which he continued to play at every opportunity until gout caught up with him in his forties. She was also right about his sybaritic, sensual and adventurous nature that drew him to experience the world for himself rather than live a scholar’s life of received opinion and reflection. However, there were aspects of his tutor’s profoundly argued philosophies that might have found some answering echo in William’s own interests and style as expressed in his later essays. Cudworth explored his theory of morality from the viewpoint of Platonism. He argued that moral judgements were based on eternal and unchanging ideals but, unlike Plato, he believed these immutable values existed in the mind of God. This kind of ethical intuitionism informed much of William Temple’s gentlemanly essays, although he was less insistent on a divine presence behind the moral patterns of human behaviour. In his jottings in old age on a range of subject matters for a forthcoming essay on conversation he wrote this:

      The chief ingredients into the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding … Good nature and good sense come from our births or tempers: good breeding and truth, chiefly by education and converse with men. Yet truth seems much in one’s blood, and is gained too by good sense and reflection; that nothing is a greater possession, nor of more advantage to those that have it, as well as those that deal with it.³⁰

      In fact William’s lack of orthodox religious certainty was to be used against him at various times in his life when he was accused of atheism, an absence of belief that was generally feared as criminal and depraved. A young man in seventeenth-century England flirting with the thought that God was not the answer to everything was as dangerously exposed as an American flirting with Communism in the mid-1950s during the McCarthyite inquisitions. The Church abhorred unbelievers and sought to demonise them. Ralph Cudworth, William’s tutor at Emmanuel, wrote in the preface to his True Intellectual System of the Universe that he would address ‘weak, staggering and sceptical theists’ but was not even going to try to argue with atheists, for they had ‘sunk into so great a degree of sottishness [folly]’ as to be beyond redemption. Even the new breed of empirical natural scientists were horrified by this absence of Christian belief and Robert Boyle, one of the founding fathers of physics and chemistry and a leading member of the Royal Society, left money in his will for a minister to preach eight sermons a year ‘for proving the Christian religion against notorious Infidels, viz. Atheists, Theists, Pagans, Jews and Mahometans’.³¹

      In France, it was illegal to publish works in defence of atheism right up to the period of the revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and in England the poet Shelley was expelled from Oxford University in 1811 for writing and distributing a moderate little pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. As late as 1869, avowed atheists could not sit in the House of Commons or give credible evidence in a court of law.

      Montaigne, who became William’s intellectual hero, was most influential in marshalling and expressing the current philosophical debate as reflected through the prism of the new scepticism. His essay Apologie de Raimond Sebond summed up why all of man’s rational achievements to date were seriously in doubt. He pointed out the subjective nature of sensual experience, how personal, social and cultural factors influenced all men’s and women’s judgements, how everything we thought we knew could just as likely be a dream. The Libertins, the avant-garde intellectuals of the early seventeenth century centred in Paris, with whom William may well have had some dealings when on his travels in France, carried this scepticism to its logical conclusion of doubting even the existence of God.

      While William absorbed some of the intellectual atmosphere of Emmanuel and played tennis in the open air, his impoverished father, back in London, turned his energies to bringing up the rest of his children. He returned from imprisonment in 1644 to his further diminished family, for his second daughter Mary had died three years before at the age of five. Four sons and one daughter remained and were to live into happy and successful adulthood. They were William, who was sixteen and just starting at Cambridge; John, twelve and probably at Bishop’s Stortford School; James who was ten; and the twins Henry and Martha who were only six years old. Martha remembered her father’s paternal care with gratitude: ‘though his fortunes in theese disorders of his Country were very low, he chose to spare in any thing, rather then what might be to ye advantage of his children in their breeding & Education. by wch he Contracted a Considerable debt, but lived to see it all payed.’³²

      During the next two years when William pursued his studies at Cambridge the country was exhausted and sickened by the continuing bloodshed and war. The Battle of Naseby in the summer of 1645 saw Cromwell’s New Model Army humiliate the royalist forces under Prince Rupert. Dorothy’s twenty-one-year-old brother, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Osborne, was just one of the many young men who perished on that muddied, bloody field. Bristol then surrendered and finally, in June 1646, Oxford, the headquarters of Charles I’s war effort. The first of the English civil wars staggered to a halt. But there was to be only a short respite before the local uprisings against the parliamentarians and invasion of the Scots fired up the second civil war in 1648.

      At this point there was no indication what William’s own sympathies in the conflict were. Although his father had been a loyal executive of the crown he was a moderate who in dismay at the increasing despotism of Charles’s rule had thrown his weight behind the parliamentary cause and had chosen a school for his son that reinforced this ideological preference. However, the person William had been closest to during his early formative years was his resolutely royalist uncle Henry Hammond. Personally and intellectually, he was progressive, rational and tolerant, but emotionally William was a patriot and a romantic with more conservative instincts. All three men, however, deplored civil war. In an essay William wrote of the ‘fatal consequences … the miseries and deplorable effects of so many foreign and civil wars … how much blood they have drawn of the bravest subjects; how they have ravaged and defaced the noblest island of the world’.³³ He saw his country as a land blessed by temperate climate and fertile soil, a beacon of happiness and moral probity to its continental neighbours, but all undermined by the bloody conflict of the worst kind of all wars.

      Certainly William looked the part and owned the tastes popularly ascribed to a cavalier gentleman and, lacking ideological or religious fervour, fitted a moderate and tolerant mould much as did both his father and uncle. But he had no overweening reverence for monarchy and СКАЧАТЬ