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

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СКАЧАТЬ perhaps, William Temple belonged to a new, scientifically minded generation where observation and rational thought were beginning to challenge orthodox views of the natural world and superstitious elements of belief, while being careful to uphold the existence of God and His intelligent design. William was born within a few years of many of the founding members of the Royal Society: the natural philosopher Robert Boyle; the economist and scientist William Petty; the physician Thomas Willis, who became known as the father of neurology; and the brilliant scientist and architect Sir Christopher Wren, who had yet to rebuild much of London after the Great Fire of 1666. This was his generation. Even the great mathematician John Wallis, who was some twelve years older, was just leaving Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as William arrived but his influence in understanding systems, be they the forerunner of modern calculus or a language he was to invent for deaf-mutes, remained, encouraging an open-minded but analytic approach to knowledge. The intellectual atmosphere was stirring with the excitement of infinite possibilities and explanations at last for some of the mysteries of the natural world.

      William Temple did not finish his degree but left Cambridge in 1647 after only two years. Perhaps the difficulties of the time, his father’s lack of funds, or his own relaxed attitude to study and desire to explore the wider world played a part in this decision. Certainly by the time he was twenty, in 1648, William was sent off on his European travels, for this was the traditional way that a young English gentleman completed the education that prepared him for the world.

      This period saw the beginning of the great popularity of the Grand Tour for ‘finishing’ the education of a gentleman of quality. Dorothy’s uncle Francis Osborne, after the runaway success of his Advice to a Son, had become the arbiter of how a young gentleman like William should conduct himself in the world. Along with his age, he accepted the desirability of foreign travel for the young male but he could not wholeheartedly agree with those who claimed ‘Travel, as the best Accomplisher of Youth and Gentry’, pointing out that experience showed it more as ‘the greatest Debaucher; adding Affectation to Folly, and Atheism to the Curiosity of many not well principled by Education’.³⁴ Disapproving of the superficial kind of tourism indulged in by fools, he did agree that travel was a necessary experience in the learning of foreign languages, although was opinionated about that too: ‘Next to Experience, Languages are the Richest Lading [cargo] of a Traveller; among which French is most useful, Italian and Spanish not being so fruitful in Learning, (except for the Mathematicks and Romances) their other Books being gelt [castrated] by the Fathers of the Inquisition.’³⁵

      Another of Dorothy’s famous uncles, the aesthete and regicide Sir John Danvers, saw travel in a more emotional light, declaring it was used by parents who had no intimacy with their children as a way of breaking their sons’ emotional bonds with the servants: ‘for then [the beginning of the seventeenth century] Parents were so austere and grave, that the sonnes must not be company for their father, and some company men must have; so they contracted a familiarity with the Serving men, who got a hank [hankering, bond] upon them they could hardly clawe off. Nay, Parents would suffer their Servants to domineer [prevail] over their Children: and some in what they found their child to take delight, in that would be sure to crosse them [and some parents were intent on denying their child whatever happiness he found].’³⁶

Osborne’s Advice ranged from warning not to gamble at cards while abroad (the stranger is always cheated), to exhorting the young Englishman to avoid his own countrymen (‘observed abroad [as] more quarrelsom with their own Nation than Strangers, and therefore marked out as the most dangerous Companions’³⁷) and, as a true son of the Reformation, he was keen that ‘those you see prostrate before a Crucifix’³⁸ should be pitied not scorned. When he was not anxious about a young man being inveigled into fights he could not win, or risking his money or his faith, he was most exercised about the dangers of foreign sex. If it was not the horror of a hurried marriage to ‘a mercenary Woman’ who had inflamed the boy and snared him in her toils, it was the fear that something even more shameful awaited the unwary tourist: ‘Who Travels Italy, handsom, young and beardless, may need as much caution and circumspection, to protect him from the Lust of Men, as the Charms of Women.’ Osborne had heard lurid stories how elderly homosexual men, ‘so enamoured to this uncouched^* way of Lust (led by what imaginary delight I know not)’, sent procurers out ‘to entice men of delicate Complexions, to the Houses of these decrepit Lechers’.³⁹

      His concern for the right and proper conduct of a young English gentleman abroad was just part of the wide-ranging advice contained in his extraordinarily popular book that illuminated the preoccupations, inner struggles and expected conduct of the seventeenth-century English gentleman (and woman too, where their lives crossed). Published in Oxford in 1656, it was devoured by the scholars there and within two years went to five editions. It was written for William’s and Dorothy’s generation and its avid readers felt Osborne was speaking directly to them, and his comprehensive edicts on education, love and marriage, travel, government and religion were closely consulted. It was written in a worldly, practical and authoritative tone of voice, occasionally embellished with cynical wit and flights of rhetorical fancy.

A couple of years after it was first published, the book was suppressed for a while by the vice-chancellor of the university in response to several complaints by local vicars that it encouraged atheism. Half-hearted suppression by elderly members of the establishment, however, would only add to its lustre among the young. Samuel Pepys, twenty-three when it was first published, was part of the generation of aspiring young bloods to whom this book was addressed. He took note of its advice on neatness of dress, reflecting glumly on his own untidiness and the loss of social confidence this caused him. The Oxford professor of anatomy, founder member of the Royal Society (and inventor of the catamaran), the brilliant Sir William Petty, admitted in a casual conversation with Pepys in a city coffee house in January 1664 ‘that in all his life these three books were the most esteemed and generally cried up for wit in the world – Religio Medici,^* Osborne’s Advice to a Son, and Hudibras’.^† To be in such company was elevated indeed.

      It took the distance of the next century, however, to kick the Advice into touch: Dr Johnson aimed his boot at its author, ‘A conceited fellow. Were a man to write so now, the boys would throw stones at him.’ This outburst had been in response to Boswell’s praise of Osborne’s work, although Boswell stuck doggedly to his original opinion that here was a writer ‘in whom I have found much shrewd and lively sense’.⁴⁰

No young man’s education was complete without some kind of sexual adventure and William was no exception. His warm emotions and romantic temperament protected him from cynicism but made him susceptible to love – the most important thing, he maintained, in his life. In his youth William appears to have had an enjoyable time, hardly surprising given his age and the fact that he was strikingly handsome, healthy and full of an exuberant energy that needed more expression than merely tennis. Unfortunately he was rash enough to boast, when he was middle-aged, to Laurence Hyde,^‡ an upwardly mobile politician who did not repay his friendship, of the sexual prowess of his youth. The much younger man found this distasteful in someone almost old enough to be his father and committed his disapproval to paper: ‘[Temple] held me in discourse a great long hour of things most relating to himself, which are never without vanity; but this was especially full of it, and some stories of his amours, and extraordinary abilities СКАЧАТЬ