LADY TEMPLE
Of Lady Temple there is very little
to be known, and what there is can be best understood
by following the career of her husband, which has
been written at some length, and with laboured care,
by Mr. Courtenay. After her marriage, which took
place in London, January 31st, 1655, they lived for
a year at the home of a friend in the country.
They then removed to Ireland, where they lived for
five years with Temple’s father; Lady Giffard,
Temple’s widowed sister, joining them. In
1663 they were living in England. Lady Giffard
continued to live with them through the rest of their
lives, and survived them both. In 1665 Temple
was sent to Brussels as English representative, and
his family joined him in the following year.
In 1668 he was removed from Brussels to the Hague,
where the successful negotiations which led to the
Triple Alliance took place, and these have given him
an honourable place in history. There is a letter
of Lady Temple’s, written to her husband in
1670, which shows how interested she was in the part
he took in political life, and how he must have consulted
her in all State matters. It is taken from Courtenay’s
Life of Sir William Temple, vol. i. . He quotes it as the only letter written after
Lady Temple’s marriage which has come into his
hands.
THE HAGUE, October 31st, 1670.
My Dearest Heart, I received
yours from Yarmouth, and was very glad you made so
happy a passage. ’Tis a comfortable thing,
when one is on this side, to know that such a thing
can be done in spite of contrary winds. I have
a letter from P., who says in character that you may
take it from him that the Duke of Buckingham has begun
a negotiation there, but what success in England he
may have he knows not; that it were to be wished our
politicians at home would consider well that there
is no trust to be put in alliances with ambitious
kings, especially such as make it their fundamental
maxim to be base. These are bold words, but they
are his own. Besides this, there is nothing but
that the French King grows very thrifty, that all
his buildings, except fortifications, are ceased, and
that his payments are not so regular as they used to
be. The people here are of another mind; they
will not spare their money, but are resolved at
least the States of Holland if the rest
will consent, to raise fourteen regiments of foot
and six of horse; that all the companies, both old
and new, shall be of 120 men that used to be of 50,
and every troop 80 that used to be of 45. Nothing
is talked of but these new levies, and the young men
are much pleased. Downton says they have strong
suspicions here you will come back no more, and that
they shall be left in the lurch; that something is
striking up with France, and that you are sent away
because you are too well inclined to these countries;
and my cousin Temple, he says, told him that a nephew
of Sir Robert Long’s, who is lately come to
Utrecht, told my cousin Temple, three weeks since,
you were not to stay long here, because you were too
great a friend to these people, and that he had it
from Mr. Williamson, who knew very well what he said.
My cousin Temple says he told it to Major Scott as
soon as he heard it, and so ’tis like you knew
it before; but there is such a want of something to
say that I catch at everything. I am my best
dear’s most affectionate
D.T.
In the summer of 1671 there occurred
an incident that reminds us considerably of the Dorothy
Osborne of former days. The Triple Alliance had
lost some of its freshness, and was not so much in
vogue as heretofore. Charles II. had been coquetting
with the French King, and at length the Government,
throwing off its mask, formally displaced Temple from
his post in Holland. “The critical position
of affairs,” says Courtenay, “induced
the Dutch to keep a fleet at sea, and the English
Government hoped to draw from that circumstance an
occasion of quarrel. A yacht was sent for Lady
Temple; the captain had orders to sail through the
Dutch fleet if he should meet it, and to fire into
the nearest ships until they should either strike
sail to the flag which he bore, or return his shot
so as to make a quarrel!
“He saw nothing of the Dutch
Fleet in going over, but on his return he fell in
with it, and fired, without warning and ceremony, into
the ships that were next him.
“The Dutch admiral, Van Ghent,
was puzzled; he seemed not to know, and probably did
not know, what the English captain meant; he therefore
sent a boat, thinking it possible that the yacht might
be in distress; when the captain told his orders,
mentioning also that he had the ambassadress on board.
Van Ghent himself then came on board, with a handsome
compliment to Lady Temple, and, making his personal
inquiries of the captain, received the same answer
as before. The Dutchman said he had no orders
upon the point, which he rightly believed to be still
unsettled, and could not believe that the fleet, commanded
by an admiral, was to strike to the King’s pleasure-boat.
“When the Admiral returned to
his ship, the captain also, ’perplexed enough,’
applied to Lady Temple, who soon saw that he desired
to get out of his difficulty by her help; but the
wife of Sir William Temple called forth the spirit
of Dorothy Osborne. ‘He knew,’ she
told the captain, ’his orders best, and what
he was to do upon them, which she left to him to follow
as he thought fit, without any regard to her or her
children.’ The Dutch and English commanders
then proceeded each upon his own course, and Lady
Temple was safely landed in England.”
There is an account of this incident
in a letter of Sir Charles Lyttelton to Viscount Hatton,
in the Hatton Correspondence. He tells us that
the poor captain, Captain Crow of The Monmouth,
“found himself in the Tower about it;”
but he does not add any further information as to
the part which Dorothy played in the matter.
After their retirement to Sheen and
Moor Park, Surrey, we know nothing distinctively of
Lady Temple, and little is known of their family life.
They had only two children living, having lost as many
as seven in their infancy. In 1684 one of these
children, their only daughter, died of small-pox;
she was buried in Westminster Abbey. There is
a letter of hers written to her father which shows
some signs of her mother’s affectionate teaching,
and which we cannot forbear to quote. It is copied
from Courtenay, vol. ii. .
SIR, I deferred writing
to you till I could tell you that I had received all
my fine things, which I have just now done; but I thought
never to have done giving you thanks for them.
They have made me so very happy in my new clothes,
and everybody that comes does admire them above all
things, but yet not so much as I think they deserve;
and now, if papa was near, I should think myself a
perfect pope, though I hope I should not be burned
as there was one at Nell Gwyn’s door the 5th
of November, who was set in a great chair, with a
red nose half a yard long, with some hundreds of boys
throwing squibs at it. Monsieur Gore and I agree
mighty well, and he makes me believe I shall come to
something at last; that is if he stays, which I don’t
doubt but he will, because all the fine ladies will
petition for him. We are got rid of the workmen
now, and our house is ready to entertain you.
Come when you please, and you will meet nobody more
glad to see you than your most obedient and dutiful
daughter,
D. TEMPLE.
Temple’s son, John Temple, married
in 1685 a rich heiress in France, the daughter of
Monsieur Duplessis Rambouillet, a French Protestant;
he brought his wife to live at his father’s
house at Sheen. After King William and Queen
Mary were actually placed on the throne, Sir William
Temple, in 1689, permitted his son to accept the office
of Secretary at War. For reasons now obscure
and unknowable, he drowned himself in the Thames within
a week of his acceptance of office, leaving this writing
behind him:
“My folly in undertaking what
I was not able to perform has done the King and kingdom
a great deal of prejudice. I wish him all happiness
and abler servants than John Temple.”
The following letter was written on
that occasion by Lady Temple to her nephew, Sir John
Osborne. The original of it is at Chicksands:
To Sir John Osborne, thanking him
for his consolation on the death of her son.
SHEEN, May 6th, 1689.
Dear Nephew, I give you
many thanks for your kind letter and the sense you
have of my affliction, which truly is very great.
But since it is laid upon me by the hand of an Almighty
and Gracious God, that always proportions His punishments
to the support He gives with them, I may hope to bear
it as a Christian ought to do, and more especially
one that is conscious to herself of having many ways
deserved it. The strange revolution we have seen
might well have taught me what this world is, yet
it seems it was necessary that I should have a near
example of the uncertainty of all human blessings,
that so having no tie to the world I may the better
prepare myself to leave it; and that this correction
may suffice to teach me my duty must be the prayer
of your affectionate aunt and humble servant,
D. TEMPLE.
During the remaining years of her
life, Lady Temple was honoured, to use the conventional
phrase, by the friendship of Queen Mary, and there
is said to have been a continuous correspondence between
them, though I can find on inquiry no trace of its
existence at the present day.
Early in the year 1695, after forty
years of married life, and in the sixty-seventh year
of her age, she died. She lies, with her husband
and children, on the north side of the nave of Westminster
Abbey, close to the little door that leads to the
organ gallery.
Her
body sleeps in Capel’s monument,
And
her immortal part with angels lives.