Chapter One

Chapter 1

Can There Be a More Romance Story Than Ours?

All letters methinks should be free and easy as one’s discourse not studied, as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm.
—DOROTHY OSBORNE [to William Temple, September 1653]

as those romances are best which are likest true stories, so are those true stories which are likest romances
—WILLIAM TEMPLE [to Dorothy Osborne, c. 1648–50]

The romance began in the dismal year of 1648. It was much wetter than usual with an English summer full of rain. The crops were spoiled, the animals sickened “and cattle died of a murrain everywhere.” The human population had fared no better. The heritage of Elizabeth I’s reign had been eighty years of peace, the longest such period since the departure of the Romans over twelve centuries before. After this, the outbreak of civil war in 1642 had come as a severe shock. Few had remained unscathed. By the time the crops failed in 1648, the first hostilities of the war were over but the bitterness remained. The nightmare of this domestic kind of war was its indistinct firing lines and the fact the enemy was not an alien but a neighbour, brother or friend. The rift lines were complex and deep. Old rivalries and new opportunism added to the murderous confusion of civil war. Waged in the name of opposing interests and ideologies, the pitiful destruction and its bitter aftermath were acted out on the village greens and town squares, in the demesnes of castles and the courtyards of great country houses.

One of the many displaced by war was the young woman Dorothy Osborne. She was twenty-one and in peaceful times w