Dorothy Osborne, Lady Temple (1627–1695)

Dorothy Osborne was born in 1627, the youngest daughter of nine surviving children, and she was brought up in the family home of Chicksands, Bedfordshire. Although best known today for her clandestine epistolary courtship with Sir William Temple—which lasted over two years before their marriage and illustrates her astute and spirited views on a broad range of topics—she also played the role of enabler within Royalist political circles.

Dorothy’s father, Sir Peter Osborne, was Lieutenant-Governor of Guernsey. During the English Civil War, he was besieged in his residence, which his forces were holding for the king, and, in 1646, he retreated to St Malo. It was while travelling in 1648 to visit him in this port that Dorothy, at the age of twenty-one, first met her future husband, the diplomat and author William Temple.

From the outset, both families opposed their marriage for political and financial reasons. At the time, Temple was travelling to complete his education in Europe, where he largely remained until 1652. Upon his return, however, the couple began a clandestine and elaborately concealed epistolary courtship. After the death of Dorothy’s father death in 1653, the two families consented to the union, although, even after the marriage in December 1654, Dorothy’s brother Henry remained hostile to Temple, allegedly on financial grounds.

William Temple’s diplomatic career regularly took them both abroad, including during his appointment as resident ambassador to the Netherlands from 1668 until 1670, when England re-allied itself with France against the Dutch. In 1671, on her journey back to England, Dorothy was instrumental in a manufactured diplomatic incident at sea that was one of the pretexts for the Third Anglo-Dutch War.

After the war, both the Temples were involved in negotiations of marriage in 1677 between William of Orange and the fifteen-year-old Mary Stuart. Sir William had become a friend of the prince, while Dorothy sometimes acted as go-between. She remained on close terms with Mary until the latter’s death in 1694. The Temples were not involved in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

As a consequence of diminishing success in his later diplomatic career, Temple effectively retired from public life from 1680 and the couple withdrew to their estate at Moor Park, where Dorothy died in 1695. Of their eight (or possibly nine) children, the two who survived infancy also died young: their daughter Diana succumbed to smallpox at the age of fourteen, and their son John died by suicide in 1689, just days after being appointed secretary-at-war by William III. Dorothy was survived by John’s two daughters, Elizabeth and Dorothy.