true romance: william temple & dorothea osbourne--part 1

two posters ahead of their time

part ii here

i love love stories. but unfortunately there is something wrong with me that prevents me from being satisfied by many love stories that seem to satisfy most of the ppl who love love stories. for instance i could not finish “the notebook” bc the girl seemed to have a weak will & also screamed too much when she was excited. but i’m obsessed with 17th century couple william temple & dorothea osbourne¹ & the letters she wrote him during their long secret courtship. i like them so much i was willing—happy!—to carry around a book whose title & cover design are straightforwardly romance-y to a degree i would normally find somewhat embarrassing.

it’s a biography, i swear

i keep tweeting about them & not getting much engagement. the tweets are bangers—

sympathetic opposition @sympatheticopp

english civil war era has some great love stories there's sir philip sidney & penelope rich there's dorothea osbourne & william temple there's charles blount baron of mountjoy & penelope rich

—so i assume that you, much like myself six months ago, are simply criminally underinformed about their lives, love, & letters. let me fix that²:

it could never work. in the shadow of the english civil war, her family were royalist, his parliamentarian. but in one of the many ironies of war, both young people’s families wanted them shipped safely overseas to take refuge from the worst of england’s turmoil, & both found themselves waiting to go to france on the isle of wight, where william’s powerful cousin colonel robert hammond acted as king charles’ jailer.

dorothea & her brother robin were about to embark for the safety of the french mainland when robin was arrested for inscribing a pro-royalist & anti-hammond bible verse in a windowpane with a diamond. in a moment of high drama which unfortunately always reminds me of the hunger games, dorothea claimed responsibility for the seditious etching. maybe the authorities just took a woman’s politics less seriously, maybe william softened his cousin’s heart—the osbournes went free, & a lifelong romance began. (dunn 14-16)

but the romance might have remained a historical anecdote or less if things had gone easily for them. both families opposed the union. their political incompatibility wasn’t the only reason. both families needed money—& each family, recognizing the value of their brilliant & beautiful child, strategized on making a financially & politically advantageous match. so dorothea & william spent the next seven years engaging in a mostly epistolary courtship.

after they served their seven years, their families surprisingly decided to permit their union—and, almost more surprisingly to me, they actually went through with it³ even in the face of a final, extremely romantic twist: dorothea being disfigured by smallpox basically on the eve of their wedding. (don’t worry, it seems like she got pretty again.) william got a job as an ambassador (another surprise for me—he had been kind of feckless before) & served well, & they lived out their lives with about the expected high level of hardship & suffering for their era, but supported by real compatibility. william became “the famous Sir William Temple”⁴ & dorothea was respected by those who knew her, but relatively unknown. the end.

until dorothea’s letters popped up again…

dorothea had to destroy all william’s letters to keep them out of the sight of her busybody brother, & all but 77 of dorothea’s letters have disappeared too. but the remainder is enough to prove that dorothea was clever, charming, well-read, felt stifled by her social/gender role in a way that is incredibly picturesque to us moderns,⁵ expected all of those things to make william love her more, & expected him to charm/entertain/philosophize to her back. the letters went unpublished for a couple of centuries, but when the victorians (who love love stories as much as i do) uncovered them, dorothea became well-known & a beloved figure. definitely people read her letters today more than they read her husband’s stuff (william had literary ambitions, but his best literary move was probably his patronage of jonathan swift).

i hope that this kind of plot-heavy intro post had enouhgh intrigue & drama to interest you in reading more next time about the personalities & relationship that the letters reveal. it’s rare to get such an intimate look at anyone, much less someone from 3 or 4-odd centuries ago…

continued here

1. jsyk her first name is often spelled dorothy & her last name osborne. i am going to stick w the dorothea osbourne spelling bc i find it the most aesthetic

2. basically all the info i have about william temple & dorothea osbourne is from the 2008 knopf hardback edition of jane dunn’s read my heart. when i paraphrase i am listing the page numbers i paraphrased from in parentheses.

3. maybe people were less complicated in the 17th c, but when i hear about star-crossed multiyear relationships happening today, i usually predict that if all obstacles evaporated, the lovers would be more faithful to finding new obstacles than to each other

4. as sir edward abbott parry calls him in his introduction to the first collected edition of dorothea osbourne’s letters

5. although i do think it’s easy for people today to read a little bit more 2022 feminism into dorothea than there actually was—something we can talk about later…