Dorothy Osborne, born in 1627, was the daughter of Sir Peter Osborne, Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer (an inherited office) and Governor of Guernsey in the days of James I. and Charles his son. She was the only daughter now (1650) unmarried, and had been named after her mother, Dorothy, without further addition. Much more could be collected of this sort from the lumber in Baronetages and Herald’s manuals; but to what purpose? William Temple was born in 1628.
It was in 1648, when the King was imprisoned at Carisbrook, in Colonel Hammond’s charge, that Dorothy first met her constant lover. They met in the Isle of Wight. She and her brother were on their way to St. Malo. Temple was starting on his travels. A little incident, almost a Waverley incident, took place here, worth reciting, perhaps. The Osbornes and Temple were loyalists. Young Osborne, more loyal than intelligent, remained behind at an inn where they had halted, that he might write on a window pane with a diamond “And Haman was hanged upon the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai.” This attack on Colonel Hammond, and the audacity of a cavalier daring to apply the Scriptures after the Puritanical method, caused the whole party to be arrested by the Roundheads, and a very pretty adventure was spoilt by the ready wit of our Dorothy taking the offence upon herself, when, through the gallantry of the Roundhead officer, the whole party was suffered to depart. “This incident,” says Courtenay, on good authority, “was not lost upon Temple.” Indeed, I think with Courtenay; but would add that much else besides was not lost upon him. Travelling with her and her brother, staying with her at St. Malo, is it to be wondered that Temple was attracted by the bright wit, clear faith and honesty of Dorothy; or that the brilliant parts and seriousness of Temple—a great contrast to many of the bibulous, rowdy cavaliers whom she must have met with—made her find in him one worthy of her friendship and her love? That Temple at this time openly declared his love I doubt. Love grew between them unknown to either. Years afterwards Dorothy writes:—
“For God’s sake, when we meet let us design one day to remember old stories in, to ask one another by what degrees our friendship grew to this height ’tis at. In earnest I am at a loss sometimes in thinking on’t; and though I can never repent of the share you have in my heart, I know not whether I gave it you willingly or not at first. No; to speak ingenuously, I think you got an interest there a good while before I thought you had any, and it grew so insensibly, and yet so fast, that all the traverses it has met with since, have served rather to discover it to me than at all to hinder it.”
The further circumstances necessary to the understanding of Dorothy’s letters, are shortly, these: Dorothy lived at Chicksands Priory, where her father was in ill-health, and there she received suitors at her parent’s commands. The Osbornes, it seemed, disliked Temple, and objected to him on the score of want of means; whilst Temple’s father had planned for his son an advantageous match in another quarter. Alas! for the frowardness of young couples! They held their course, and waited successfully.
Hardly can we do better that you may picture Dorothy and her mode of life clearly to yourself, than copy this important letter for you at length:
“You ask me how I pass my time here. I can give you a perfect account, not only of what I do for the present, but of what I am likely to do this seven years if I stay here so long. I rise in the morning reasonably early, and before I am ready I go round the house till I am weary of that, and then in the garden till it grows too hot for me. About ten o’clock I think of making me ready; and when that’s done I go into my father’s chamber; from thence to dinner, where my cousin Molle and I sit in great state in a room and at a table that would hold a great many more. After dinner we sit and talk till Mr. B. comes in question, and then I am gone. The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads; I go to them, and compare their voices and beauty to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so. Most commonly, while we are in the middle of our discourse, one looks about her, and spies her cows going into the corn, and then away they all run as if they had wings at their heels. I, that am not so nimble, stay behind, and when I see them driving home their cattle I think ’tis time for me to retire too. When I have supped I go into the garden, and so to the side of a small river that runs by it, where I sit down and wish you with me (you had best say this is not kind, neither). In earnest, ’tis a pleasant place, and would be more so to me if I had your company. I sit there sometimes till I am lost with thinking; and were it not for some cruel thought of the crossness of our fortune, that will not let me sleep there, I should forget there were such a thing to be done as going to bed.”
Truly a quiet country life, in a quiet country house; poor lonely Dorothy!
Chicksands Priory, Bedfordshire, is a low-built sacro-secular edifice, well fitted for its former service Its priestly denizens were turned out in Henry VIII’s monk-hunting reign (1538). To the joy or sorrow of the neighbourhood: who knows now? Granted then to one, Richard Snow, of whom the records are silent; by him sold, in Elizabeth’s reign, to Sir John Osborne, Knt. (Dorothy’s brother was first baronet); thus it becomes the ancestral home of our Dorothy. There is a crisp etching of the house in Fisher’s Collections of Bedfordshire. The very exterior of it is Catholic, unpuritanical, no methodism about the square windows set here and there, at undecided intervals, wheresoever they may be wanted. Six attic windows jut out from the low-tiled roof. At the corner of the house a high pinnacled buttress rising the full height of the wall; five buttresses flank the side wall, built so that they shade the lower windows from the morning sun, in one place reaching to the sill of an upper window. Perhaps Mrs. Dorothy’s window; how tempting to scale and see. What a spot for the happier realisation of Romeo and Juliet, or of Sigismonde and Guichard, if this were romance. In one end of the wall are two Gothic windows, claustral remnants, lighting now, perhaps, the dining-hall, where cousin Molle and Dorothy sat in state; or the saloon, where the latter received her servants. There are old cloisters attached to the house; at the other side of it may be. Yes! a sleepy country house, the warm earth and her shrubs creeping close up to the very sills of the lower windows, sending in morning fragrance, I doubt not, when Dorothy thrust back the lattice after breakfast. A quiet place, “slow” is the accurate modern epithet for it, “awfully slow.” But to Dorothy, a quite suitable home at which she never repines.
This etching of Thomas Fisher, of December 26th, 1816, is a godsend to me, hearing as I do that Chicksands Priory no longer remains to us, having suffered martyrdom at the bloody hands of the restorer. For through this, partly, we have attained to a knowledge of Dorothy’s surroundings, and may now safely let Dorothy herself tell us of the servants visiting her at Chicksands during those long seven years through which she remains constant to Temple. See what she expects in a lover! Have we not here some local squires hit off to the life? Could George Eliot have done more for us in like space?
“There are a great many ingredients must go to the making me happy in a husband. First, as my Cousin Franklin says our humours must agree, and to do that he must have that kind of breeding that I have had, and used that kind of company. That is, he must not be so much a country gentleman as to understand nothing but hawks and dogs, and be fonder of either than of his wife; nor of the next sort of them, whose aim reaches no farther than to be Justice of Peace, and once in his life High Sheriff, who reads no books but statutes, and studies nothing but how to make a speech interlarded with Latin, that may amaze his disagreeing poor neighbours, and fright them rather than persuade them into quietness. He must not be a thing that began the world in a free school, was sent from thence to the university, and is at his furthest when he reaches the Inns of Court, has no acquaintance but those of his form in those places, speaks the French he has picked out of old laws, and admires nothing but the stories he has heard of the revels that were kept there before his time. He must not be a town gallant neither, that lives in a tavern and an ordinary, that cannot imagine how an hour should be spent without company unless it be in sleeping, that makes court to all the women he sees, thinks they believe him, and laughs and is laughed at equally. Nor a travelled Monsieur, whose head is feather inside and outside, that can talk of nothing but of dances and duels, and has courage enough to wear slashes, when everybody else dies with cold to see him. He must not be a fool of no sort, nor peevish, nor ill-natured, nor proud, nor courteous; and to all this must be added, that he must love me, and I him, as much as we are capable of loving. Without all this his fortune, though never so great, would not satisfy me; and with it a very moderate one would keep me from ever repenting my disposal.”