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

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СКАЧАТЬ only the genetic inheritance of their brothers but, in early childhood at least, the family circumstances and ethos too. The sexes usually were separated later by expectations, education and opportunity, but the girls were just as much participants in the experiences of their childhood, the personalities that surrounded them and the animating spirit of the family. If brothers were educated at home then part of that education at least became accessible to any willing and able sister. The intellectual and personal qualities that distinguished the men, however, were more likely expressed in their sisters’ lives domestically and obliquely.

      Dorothy’s mother had three remarkable brothers. She and her youngest sister Lady Gargrave might well have been remarkable too if they had been allowed to express themselves on a wider stage, the one becoming a resourceful melancholic and the other a forceful busybody. These three brothers all lived adventurous and boldly individual lives, all in the public eye, and suffered dramatically opposing fates. As uncles to Dorothy and brothers to her mother, their characters and experiences, and the family stories about them, were part of what made Dorothy Osborne’s own life and character what they were. She even, along with her family, spent some time living in the house of the youngest uncle in Chelsea in London.

Her eldest uncle, Sir Charles Danvers, was a soldier and man of action. Born in 1568 at the heart of Elizabeth I’s reign, he could have made a great career for himself in that world of swaggering and ambitious men. At barely twenty years old, he was knighted by his commander for courageous service in the Netherlands. Unfortunately he was later implicated in the murder, by his brother Henry, of a Wiltshire neighbour, and both had to flee as outlaws to France, where they came to the notice of the French king Henri IV, who, along with some Danvers sympathisers from their own country, petitioned Elizabeth I and William Cecil for a pardon. According to John Aubrey, also born in Wiltshire with a Danvers grandmother of his own, Lady Elizabeth Danvers, Dorothy’s formidable grandmother, having been widowed in her forties, then married Queen Elizabeth’s cousin Sir Edmund Carey,^* himself only ten years older than her eldest son, specifically to expedite her sons’ pardons.

      When he eventually returned to England in 1598, Sir Charles’s gratitude and loyalty to the Earl of Southampton, who had come to his aid and offered him refuge after the murder, led him into the ill-fated Essex Plot against their queen. When this was discovered he admitted all and was beheaded for treason in 1601, still only in his early thirties. This happened two decades before Dorothy’s birth, but Sir Charles Danvers was the eldest son and heir and the stain of treason marked a family for generations, laying waste to their fortunes in the process.

      Dorothy’s next uncle, Henry, the perpetrator of the original murder, was born in 1573. He was to be raised to great heights as the Earl of Danby and would die in 1644 ‘full of honours, wounds, and dais’ at the considerable age of seventy. He was already a middle-aged man when Dorothy was born. Like his elder brother he showed precocious military leadership and valour. He was commander of a company of infantry by the age of eighteen and knighted after the Siege of Rouen in 1591 when he was only nineteen. He was twenty-one when, involved in a neighbourly dispute, he fired the fatal shot that killed Henry Long and branded him a murderer. This scandal and resulting exile of both brothers devastated the family, and was the fatal blow for their gentle father. Aubrey wrote how he had been particularly affected, ‘his sonnes’ sad accident brake his heart’,³ and in fact Sir John died only two months later in 1594, without further contact with his eldest exiled sons, or any intimation of the adventures and celebrity that awaited them. Sir Henry’s outlawry was reversed eventually in 1604, but by then his father had been dead for ten years, his mother had married again and his elder brother Charles had died the ignominious death of a traitor.

More honours were heaped on Sir Henry Danvers’s head. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign he was made sergeant-major-general in Ireland, James I created him Baron Danvers of Dauntsey for his valiant service there and Charles I made him Earl of Danby in 1626. Aubrey described him as having ‘a magnificent and munificent Spirit’. He was tall and lean, ‘sedate and solid … a great Improver of his Estate, to eleaven thousand pounds per annum at the least, neer twelve.^* A great Oeconomist’.⁴ In 1621 he had been awarded the governorship of the Isle of Guernsey for life but when required to do something to defend the island appeared to find this honour rather less attractive and somewhat beneath his dignity: ‘[Danby] thinks it not for the king’s honour, nor suitable to his own reputation, that he, who was appointed general against anticipated foreign invaders in Ireland, should go to Guernsey to be shut up in a castle’.⁵ When civil war loomed, this poisoned chalice was passed to his brother-in-law, Dorothy’s father, Sir Peter Osborne, whose dogged loyalty to the king and defence of the said castle cost him his health, his fortune and possibly hastened the death of his wife.

      Dorothy’s youngest Danvers uncle, Sir John, born in 1588, was perhaps the most individual of them all and the uncle she knew best. He had a strong aesthetic taste in houses and gardens and when Dorothy was a girl she and some of her family lodged for a time in his magnificent house in Chelsea. His influence on his young niece was likely to be lasting as he lived until she was in her late twenties. As a young man John Danvers’s beauty matched his singular discrimination in art and architecture. Aubrey recalled his good looks and charming nature: ‘He had in a faire Body an harmonicall Mind: In his Youth his Complexion was so exceedingly beautifull and fine, that … the People would come after him in the Street to admire Him. He had a very fine Fancy, which lay (chiefly) for Gardens, and Architecture.’⁶

So great was his interest and skill in gardening that Aubrey claimed the garden Sir John created for his house at Chelsea^† was the first to introduce Italianate style to London. Its beauty was legendary and it was this garden, full of harmony of scale and proportion, of scented plants and fruiting trees, that Dorothy would have known as a child. Sir John’s own sensual response to its delights was captured by the great biographer in this evocative vignette of how he scented his hat with herbs: ‘[he] was wont in fair mornings in the Summer to brush his Beaver-hatt on the Hyssop and Thyme, which did perfume it with its naturall spirit; and would last a morning or longer’.⁷ He leased a part of his land to the Society of Apothecaries and eventually they established the famous Chelsea Physic Garden there in 1673, one of the oldest botanical gardens in Europe.

When John Danvers was barely twenty he married Magdalen Herbert, the widow of Richard Herbert and mother of ten children, one of whom became the famous poet and divine, George Herbert.^* John was knighted by James I the following year in 1609. Two more marriages to heiresses followed but his extravagant tastes in interior decoration and horticultural grandeur resulted in mounting debts. He was a member of parliament and a gentleman of the privy chamber under Charles I. Always generous ‘to distressed and cashiered Cavaliers’, eventually his own debts caught up with him, making him reluctant to help finance the king’s expedition to Scotland in 1639. By the beginning of the civil war in 1642 he took up arms for parliament against the king. On Charles’s defeat he was one of the commissioners appointed to try the king and subsequently a signatory to the royal death warrant.

Dorothy’s Danvers uncles had had ‘traitor’ and ‘murderer’ attached to their names; now Sir John, to whom she had been closest, became notorious in history as Danvers the ‘regicide’.^† Given her father’s passionate and unquestioning support for Charles I, willing to give his fortune and even his life for him, it must have been difficult for Dorothy in this febrile time to reconcile a fond and admired uncle being so closely implicated in the murder of the king.

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