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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ href="#litres_trial_promo">⁴¹ A kinder interpretation of William’s character in this revealing aside is that, older and physically impaired with gout, he wished to share his pleasure and amusement in the memory of a more vigorous and younger self.

      Inevitably Francis Osborne’s handbook had an answer to the unchecked male libido. Predictably cynical about marriage, he was suspicious of love and fearful of where sexual desire could lead: he painted a ghastly picture of what horrors awaited a man who chose a woman as his wife because he found her attractive or thought he loved her: ‘Those Vertues, Graces, and reciprocal Desires, bewitched Affection expected to meet and enjoy, Fruition and Experience will find absent, and nothing left but a painted Box, which Children and time will empty of Delight; leaving Diseases behind, or, at best, incurable Antiquity.’⁴² Escape from such a snare and delusion as sexual love, he believed, was best effected by leaving the object of your desire and crossing the sea. But of course journeys abroad also brought unexpected meetings, unfamiliar freedoms and adventure of every kind.

* Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) embodied the Elizabethan ideal, being not only a man of culture and a leading literary figure but also someone at ease in the worlds of politics and military action. His early death sent his reputation skywards, the touch paper lit by his spectacular funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, the propellant being posthumous publication of his prose and poetic works.

† Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1566–1601), courtier and soldier of grandiose ambition. Favourite of an ageing queen, his desire for power and military glory, allied to arrogance and incompetence, in the end alienated everyone, apart from the populace to whom he remained a flamboyant hero. A half-baked plot against Elizabeth I forced her hand and, in his thirty-fifth year, he was tried and executed, to the dismay of the queen and her people.

‡ Petrus Ramus (1515–72) was a French humanist and logician who argued against scholasticism, insisting the general should come before the specific, consideration of the wood before the trees. As professor of philosophy at the Collège de France, his eloquence and controversial stand regularly attracted audiences of 2,000 or more. Attacks on him became even more virulent when he converted to Protestantism; he perished finally in the conflagration of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

* Master of the Rolls is an ancient office where the holder originally was keeper of the national records, acting as secretary of state and lord chancellor’s assistant. Judicial responsibilities were gradually added over the centuries until the present day when the Master of the Rolls presides over the civil division of the Court of Appeal and is second in the judicial hierarchy, behind the lord chief justice.

* For a detailed discussion of the constituents and aims of the Junto, see The Noble Revolt, John Adamson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).

* Henry Peacham (1576–1643) rather confusingly was the writer and poet son of the curate Henry Peacham (1546–1634) who was himself well known for his book on rhetoric, The Garden of Eloquence (1577). Lack of funds meant the younger Peacham was ‘Rawlie torn’ in 1598 from his student life at Cambridge to make his way in the world. He became a master of the free school at Wymondham, Norfolk, where he encountered the brutal schooling of boys that he reluctantly accepted as necessary if they were to be educated. He made his name with The Compleat Gentleman (1622), a book that was keenly read in the New England colonies, and possibly was responsible for its author’s name being immortalised in the naming of Peacham, Vermont.

* Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), an English philosopher opposed to Thomas Hobbes and leader of the Cambridge Platonists. Master of Clare Hall and then of Christ’s College, Cambridge and professor of Hebrew. He had an intellectual daughter, Damaris, Lady Masham, who became a friend of the philosophers John Locke and Leibniz.

† The Cambridge Platonists were a group of philosophers in the middle of the seventeenth century who believed that religion and reason should always be in harmony. Although closer in sympathy to the Puritan view, with its valuing of individual experience, they argued for moderation in religion and politics and like Abelard promoted a mystical understanding of reason as a pathway to the divine.

* Henry St John, Viscount Bolinbroke (1678–1751), an ambitious and unscrupulous politician and favourite of Queen Anne’s. He turned his brilliant gifts to writing philosophical and political tracts. His philosophical writings were closely based on the philosopher John Locke’s (1632–1704) inductive approach to knowledge, reasoning from observations to generalisations (to which Ralph Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists were opposed). Few were published in his lifetime. He died, after a long life, a disappointed man.

* The use of uncouched is interesting. It can mean rampant, the opposite of the heraldic term couchant, but more to the point uncouched also refers to an animal that has been driven from its lair. The image of a beast unleashed is very appropriate here, for it expressed Osborne’s fear, fascination and recoil from homosexuality: already he had referred to it as ‘noisom Bestiality’, but also that telling parenthesis revealed a curiosity about the ‘delight I know not’.

* Religio Medici was Sir Thomas Browne’s (1605–82) famous meditation on matters of faith, humanity and love, first published in 1642, reprinted often and translated into many languages. As a doctor and a Christian he illuminated his tolerant, wide-ranging thesis with classical allusions, poetry and philosophy.

† Written by Samuel Butler (1613–80), Hudibras was a mock romance in the style of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, written in three parts, each with three cantos of heavily satirical verse, published 1662–80. With his framework of a Presbyterian knight Sir Hudibras and his sectarian squire Ralpho embarked on their quest, Butler poked lethal fun at the wide world of politics, theological dogma, scholasticism, alchemy, astrology and the supernatural.

‡ Laurence Hyde, 4th Earl of Rochester (1641–1711), was the second son of the great politician and historian the Earl of Clarendon. A royalist, he rose to power and influence at Charles II’s restoration and was made an earl in 1681, becoming lord high treasurer under his brother-in-law James II. His nieces became Queens Mary and Anne.

       CHAPTER FOUR

       Time nor Accidents Shall not Prevaile

      I will write Every week, and noe misse of letters shall give us any doubts of one another, Time nor accidents shall not prevaile upon our hearts, and if God Almighty please to blesse us, wee will meet the same wee are, or happyer; I will doe all you bid mee, I will pray, and wish and hope, but you must doe soe too then; and bee soe carfull of your self that I may have nothing to reproche you with when you come back.

      DOROTHY OSBORNE, letter to William Temple

       СКАЧАТЬ