The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 | Page 8

their home.
Chixon, Chikesonds, or Chicksands Priory, Bedfordshire, as it now
stands,--what a pleasing various art was spelling in olden time,--was, in
the reign of Edward III., a nunnery, situated then, as now, on a slight
eminence, with gently rising hills at a short distance behind, and a
brook running to join the river Ivel, thence the German Ocean, along
the valley in front of the house. The neighbouring scenery of
Bedfordshire is on a humble scale, and concerns very little those who
do not frequent it and live among it, as we must do for the next year or
more.
The Priory 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., thus becoming 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 is 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. At the
further 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 still cloisters attached to the house, at the other side of it maybe.
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 by Thomas Fisher, of December 26, 1816, is the more
valuable to us since the old Chicksands Priory no longer remains,
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 through the baronetages, peerages, and the invincible
heaps of genealogical records, we have gathered some few actual facts
necessary to be known of Dorothy's relations, her human surroundings,
their lives and actions. And we shall not find ourselves following
Dorothy's story with the less interest that we have mastered these
details about the Osbornes of Chicksands.
Temple, too, claims the consideration at our hands of a few words
concerning his near relatives and their position in the country. As
Macaulay tells us, he was born in 1628, the place of his birth being
Blackfriars in London.
Sir John Temple, his father, was Master of the Rolls and a Privy
Councillor in Ireland; he was in the confidence of Robert Sidney, Earl

of Leicester, the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. Algernon Sydney, the
Earl's son, was well known to Temple, and perhaps to Dorothy. Sir
John Temple, like his son in after life, refused to look on politics as a
game in which it was always advisable to play on the winning side, and
thus we find him opposing the Duke of Ormond in Ireland in 1643, and
suffering imprisonment as a partisan of the Parliament. In England, in
1648, when he was member for Chichester, he concurred with the
Presbyterian vote, thereby causing the more advanced section to look
askance at him, and he was turned out of the House, or secluded, to use
the elegant parliamentary language of the day. From that time he lived
in retirement in London until 1654, when, as we read in Dorothy's
letters, he and his son go over to Ireland. He resumed his office of
Master of the Rolls, and in August of that year was elected to the Irish
Parliament as one of the members for Leitrim, Sligo, and Roscommon.
Temple's mother was a sister of Dr. Hammond, to whom one Dr. John
Collop, a poetaster unknown in these days even by name, begins an
ode--
"Seraphic Doctor, bright evangelist."
The "seraphic Doctor" was rector of Penshurst, near Tunbridge Wells,
the seat of the Sydneys. From Hammond, who was a zealous adherent
of Charles I., Temple received much of his early education. When the
Parliament drove Dr. Hammond from his living, Temple was sent to
school at Bishop-Stortford; and the rest of his early life, with an
account