Part 7

Perhaps, in these seven long apprentice years to matrimony, Dorothy had no trouble causing her more real anguish than her fears concerning Temple’s religious belief. Gossiping Bishop Burnet, in one of his more ill-natured passages, tells us that Temple was an Epicurean, thinking religion to be fit only for the mob; and a corrupter of all that came near him. Unkind words these, with just perhaps those dregs of truth in them, which make gossip so hard to bear patiently. Temple, I take it, was too intelligent not to see the hollow, noisy, drum nature of much of the religion around him; preferred also, as young men will do, to air speculative opinions rather than consider them; hence the bishop’s censure. Was it true, as Courtenay thinks, that jealousy of King William’s attachment to Temple, disturbed the episcopal equipoise of soul, rendering his Lordship slanderous, even a backbiter? To us, brother servants of Dorothy, this matters not. Sufficient pity is it, that Dorothy is forced to write to her lover in such words as these: “I tremble at the desperate things you say in your letter: for the love of God, consider seriously with yourself what can enter into comparison with the safety of your soul? Are a thousand women or ten thousand worlds worth it? No, you cannot have so little reason left as you pretend, nor so little religion; for God’s sake let us not neglect what can only make us happy for a trifle. If God had seen it fit to have satisfied our desires, we should have had them, and everything would not have conspired thus to cross them; since He has decreed it otherwise (at least as far as we are able to judge by events) we must submit, and not by striving make an innocent passion a sin, and show a childish stubbornness. I could say a thousand things more to this purpose if I were not in haste to send this away, that it may come to you at least as soon as the other.

Adieu.”

Thus, you see, Dorothy is not without her fears; but, though she can write thus to her lover, yet, when he is attacked by her brother, she is ready to defend him; having at heart that real faith in his righteousness, without which there could be no love. “All this,” she writes in another letter, “I can say to you; but when my brother disputes it with me, I have other arguments for him, and I drove him up so close t’other night, that for want of a better gap to get out at, he was fain to say that he feared as much your having a fortune as your having none, for he saw you held my Lord S.’s principles; that religion and honour were things you did not consider at all; and that he was confident you would take any engagement, serve in any employment, or do anything to advance yourself. I had no patience for this: to say you were a beggar, your father not worth £4,000 in the whole world, was nothing in comparison of having no religion, nor no honour. I forgot all my disguise, and we talked ourselves weary; he renounced me again, and I defied him.”

There is no religious twaddle in Dorothy’s letters; her religion grew from within herself, and was not the distorted reflection of Scriptural beliefs coloured by modern sympathies and antipathies. She does not satisfy her tendency towards righteousness by the mock humility of constant self-abasement, or by the juggling misapplication of texts of Scripture. Indeed, the depth of her faith and belief is not to be seen on the surface of these letters—hardly, indeed, to be understood at all, I think, except from the charitable tendency of her thoughts, her deep silences and self-restraint. Dorothy, it appears, sees with her clear smiling eyes quite through the loudly-expressed longings for the next world, which had helped to put some prominent men of the time in high places in this. “We complain,” she writes, “of this world and the variety of crosses and afflictions it abounds in and yet for all this who is weary on’t (more than in discourse), who thinks with pleasure of leaving it or preparing for the next? We see old folks that have outlived all the comforts of life desire to continue it and nothing can wean us from the folly of preferring a mortal being, subject to great infirmity and unavoidable decays, before an immortal one, and all the glories that are promised with it. Is this not very like preaching? Well, ’tis too good for you—you shall have no more on’t. I am afraid you are not mortified enough for such discourses to work upon, though I am not of my brother’s opinion neither, that you have no religion in you. In earnest, I never took anything he ever said half so ill, as nothing is so great an injury. It must suppose one to be the devil in human shape.”

Seven long years! Which of you, my readers, has waited this time without a murmur and without a doubt? Was not this an acting of faith far higher than any letter writing of it? Let us think so, and honour it as such. Here is a letter, written when doubt almost overwhelmed, when the _spleen_ (a disease as common now as then, though we have lost the good name for it) was upon her, when the world looked blank, and life a drifting mist of despair.

“Let me tell you that if I could help it I would not love you, and that as long as I live I shall strive against it, as against that which has been my ruin, and was certainly sent me as a punishment for my sins. But I shall always have a sense of your misfortunes equal if not above my own; I shall pray that you may obtain quiet I never hope for but in my grave, and I shall never change my condition but with my life. Yet let not this give you a hope. Nothing can ever persuade me to enter the world again; I shall in a short time have disengaged myself of all my little affairs in it and settled myself in a condition to apprehend nothing but too long a life, and therefore I wish you to forget me, and to induce you to it let me tell you freely that I deserve you should. If I remember anybody ’tis against my will; I am possessed with that strange insensibility that my nearest relations have no tie upon me, and I find myself no more concerned in those that I have heretofore had great tenderness of affection for, than if they had died long before I was born; leave me to this, and seek a better fortune: I beg it of you as heartily as I forgive you all those strange thoughts you have had of me; think me so still if that will do anything towards it, for God’s sake so, take any course that may make you happy, or if that cannot be, less unfortunate at least than

Your friend and humble servant,

D. OSBORNE.”

Such letters are, happily, not numerous. Here is another, of a quite different nature, in which you can read the practical English sense of our Dorothy, and her thoughts about love in a cottage:—

“I have not lived thus long in the world, and in this age of changes, but certainly I know what an estate is; I have seen my father’s reduced better than £4,000 to not £400 a year, and I thank God I never felt the change in anything that I thought necessary. I never wanted, and am confident I never shall. But yet I would not be thought so inconsiderate a person as not to remember that it is expected from all people that have sense that they should act with reason; that to all persons some proportion of fortune is necessary, according to their several qualities, and though it is not required that one should tie oneself to just so much, and something is left for one’s inclination, and the difference in the persons to make, yet still within such a compass; (a little incoherent this, meaning, I think, that Dorothy does not believe that even the world would have you choose by money and goods alone), and such as lay more upon these considerations than they will bear, shall infallibly be condemned by all sober persons. If any accident out of my power should bring me to necessity though never so great, I should not doubt with God’s assistance, but to bear it as well as anybody, and I should never be ashamed on’t if He pleased to send it me; but if by my own folly I had put it upon myself, the case would be extremely altered.” But this is Dorothy in her serious strain; often (how often?) she plays the lover, and though I disapprove of peeping into such letters, doubting if Cupid recognises any statute of limitations in these affairs, yet to complete the fabric we must play eavesdropper for once.

“It will be pleasinger to you, I am sure, to tell you how fond I am of your lock. Well, in earnest now, and setting aside all compliment I never saw finer hair, nor of a better colour; but cut no more of it. I would not have it spoiled for the world; if you love me be careful of it; I am combing and curling and kissing this lock all day, and dreaming of it all night. The ring, too, is very well, only a little of the biggest. Send me a tortoiseshell one to keep it on, that is a little less than that I sent for a pattern. I would not have the rule absolutely true without exception, that hard hairs are ill-natured, for then I should be so; but I can allow that all soft hairs are good, and so are you, or I am deceived as much as you are, if you think I do not love you enough. Tell me, my dearest, am I? You will not be if you think I am not yours.”

Space! space! how narrow, how harsh, and ungallant thou art; not ready to give place, even to Dorothy herself. We must hasten to the end. Dorothy, it appears, unlike some of her sex, does not like playing the Mrs. Bride in a public wedding. “I never yet,” she writes, “saw anyone that did not look simply and out of countenance, nor ever knew a wedding well designed but one, and that was of two persons who had time enough I confess to contrive it, and nobody to please in’t but themselves. He came down into the country where she was upon a visit, and one morning married her. As soon as they came out of the church, they took coach and came for the town, dined at an inn by the way, and at night came into lodgings that were provided for them, where nobody knew them, and where they passed for married people of seven years’ standing. The truth is I could not endure to be Mrs. Bride in a public wedding, to be made the happiest person on earth; do not take it ill, for I would endure it if I could, rather than fail, but in earnest I do not think it were possible for me.”

But her father is now dead. Her brother, Peyton, is to make the treaty for her. Here is the letter, dated for once (Oct. 2, 1654), inviting Temple to come, and she will name the day; at least, Courtenay tells us, that in this interview the preliminaries were settled. “After a long debate with myself how to satisfy you, and remove that rock (as you call it) which in your apprehensions is of no great danger, I am at last resolved to let you see that I value your affection for me at as high a rate as you yourself can set it, and that you cannot have more of tenderness for me and my interests than I shall ever have for yours. The particulars how I intend to make this good, you shall know when I see you, which, since I find them here more irresolute in point of time (though not as to the journey itself) than I hoped they would have been, notwithstanding your quarrel to me, and the apprehensions you would make me believe you have that I do not care to see you—pray come hither, and try whether you shall be welcome or not.”

And now one moment of suspense. A last trial to the lover’s constancy. The bride is taken dangerously ill. So seriously ill that the doctors rejoice when the disease pronounces itself to be small-pox. Alas! who shall now say what are the inmost thoughts of our Dorothy? Does she not now need all her faith in her lover, in herself, ay, and in God, to uphold her in this new affliction. She rises from her bed, her beauty of face destroyed; her fair looks living only on the painter’s canvas, unless we may believe that they were etched in deeply bitten lines on Temple’s heart. But this skin beauty is not the firmest hold she has on Temple’s affections; this was not the beauty that had attracted her lover, and held him enchained in her service for seven years of waiting and suspense; this was not the only light leading him through dark days of doubt, almost of despair, constant, unwavering in his troth to her. Other beauty, not outward, of which I may not write, having seen it but darkly, only through these letters; knowing it indeed to be there, but quite unable to visualise it fully, or to paint it clearly on these pages; other beauty it is, than that of face and form, that made Dorothy to Temple and to all men, in fact, as she was in name—the gift of God.

They are wedded, says Courtenay, at the end of 1654; and thus my task ends. Of Lady Temple there is little to know, and this is not the place to set it down. She lies on the north side of the west aisle at Westminster, with her husband and children.

“Her body sleeps in Capel’s monument, And her immortal past with angels lives.”

You, reading for yourself, will perhaps gaze upon the darkened tablet, with new interest; and may, perhaps, thank him who has shown you this picture. Yes, thank him, not as author or historian, but as a servant holding a lamp, but ill-trimmed may be, before a glowing picture, careful that what light he holds, may not glisten on its shining surface, and hide the painting from sight; or as a menial, drawing aside with difficulty the heavy, dusty curtain of intervening ages which has veiled from human eyes the beautiful figure of Dorothy Osborne. She herself is the picture, and the painter of it; the historian of her own history. But not even to her are the real thanks due; these must be humbly offered to Him from whom she came to represent

“A holy woman and the perfect wife.”

THE DEBTOR OF TO-DAY.

“He that dies pays all debts.”

_Tempest_ iii., 2.

The debtor is a slave. In the nature of things he always has been and must be a slave. The debtor of to-day is not such a direct slave as his ancestor of remote ages, but he is, in political phrase, a relic of barbarism living under servile conditions. As he has no organisation, and as, in the picturesque analogy of the man in the street, he is a bottom-dog in every sense of the word, no one worries about him. Eleven thousand of him go to gaol every year, and process is issued against three or four hundred thousand, but there is no party capital to be made out of the subject, no one statesman can abuse any other statesman for neglecting the question, and the churches and chapels are so keen about fighting over the technicalities of catechisms that they have no time to worry over the sorrows of the debtor of to-day.

It was not always so. Elisha the Prophet thought it worth while to perform a miracle on one well-known occasion in order to pay the bailiffs out. The creditor, if you remember, had come to the widow’s house “to take unto him my two sons to be bondmen.” In those days you took in execution not only the debtor himself, but his wife and family. Elisha was indignant. He orders the widow to borrow her neighbour’s vessels and fills them miraculously with oil. Then he says: “Go, sell the oil and pay thy debt, and live thou and thy children of the rest.” One does not expect miracles from our clergy of to-day, but a consideration of the subject, and the discussion of its social aspects, would be a following out of Elisha’s example. I for one have never yet heard a sermon on imprisonment for debt, but the texts are plentiful, and to any intending preacher I will willingly supply the references.

As in Hebrew times, so in the days of Greece and Rome, you find the slavery of the debtor continue, and what seems to be wanting in the legislator of to-day, an anxiety to relieve his condition. Solon, the Greek law-giver, had sounder notions of the matter than any modern Home Secretary whose views I have come across. It would be interesting to trace the evolution of our poor unfortunate County Court debtor of to-day across the spacious pages of history, through the various degrees of ignominy, slavery, and misery that the debtor has been made to suffer, until we see him what he is to-day—not a very ill-used martyr, perhaps, but the victim of an utterly out-of-date system, the remnant of the cruel laws of the Middle Ages.

To Charles Dickens must be awarded a great portion of the honour that is due to those who abolished the horrible incidents of the imprisonment for debt that existed in his day.

The picture of the old debtor dying in the Fleet after twenty years of captivity must have haunted even the most callous official the Circumlocution Office ever produced. Great reforms followed, but in the usual English way, in scraps and portions by means of compromise and amendment, and by degrees. At last, in 1869, came the start of the present system of imprisonment for debt which abolished a great deal of imprisonment, but left the very poorest still under threat of the gaol if they did not pay their debts. There were many great reformers of that day who saw that the time was even then ripe for total abolition, and that the House of Commons was legislating on too conservative lines.

Jessel, a great lawyer and a sound law-giver, laid down the principle that has always been to me a statement of the true gospel on this question. “In no case,” he says, “should a man suffer penal imprisonment because he failed to pay a certain sum of money on a private contract with which the public had nothing to do.” When we have legislated to that effect we shall get rid of this relic of the barbarous ages that is still with us—imprisonment for debt.

And a word to explain what the system means. It must be remembered that the smaller debts in County Courts are generally ordered to be paid by instalments. Where a debt or instalment is in arrear, and it is proved to the satisfaction of the Court that the person making default either has, or has had since the date of the order or judgment, the means to pay the sum in respect of which he has made default, and has refused or neglected to pay, the Judge may commit him to prison for a period of not more than forty-two days. In practice the wind is very much tempered to the shorn lamb, and a period of twenty-one days is generally the maximum imprisonment ordered. In practice, also, debtors will beg, borrow, and perhaps do worse rather than go to prison, and the result is that the percentage actually imprisoned is small. This, to my mind, has very little bearing on the question whether the system is a wise one in the interests of the State and of the working-man. For it must not be forgotten that the system is in practice a system of collecting debts from the wage-earning class, and the wage-earning class only. It is, of course, incidentally used against small tradesmen and others, but the bulk of those against whom orders are made are working-men. As the late Mr. Commissioner Kerr said in 1873, “The rich man makes a clean sweep of it, and begins again, and the poor man has a miserable debt hanging round his neck all his life.”

For the rich bankrupt is really rather a pampered creature. Here you have the younger son of a duke whose creditors are mostly money-lenders and tradesmen, whose downfall is due to betting, and who has known of his insolvency for a long period, owing £36,631, and his assets are £100. The Official Receiver drops a silent tear of pity over the statement of affairs, and, like the tear of the recording angel, it blots out the record and the younger son goes forth ducally to prey upon a new generation of creditors. Here, again, you have a bankrupt, an ex-Army officer, living on his wife’s income, and betting, and winding up with debts £27,741, and assets £667. These are not fancy cases, they come out of the stern, dull reports of the Inspector-General of Bankruptcy. And as long as such men are allowed to live without fear of imprisonment day by day, we cannot sit down and say with a clear conscience that we have only one law for rich and poor.

The chief evil of the present system of imprisonment for debt is the undesirable class of trade and traders that it encourages: the money-lenders, the credit drapers, the “Scotchmen,” the travelling jewellers, the furniture hirers, and all those firms who tout their goods round the streets for sale by small weekly instalments, relying on imprisonment for debt to enable them to plant their goods out on the weaklings. The law as it stands assists the knave at the expense of the fool. I was discussing with a rather slow-minded working-man and his wife why he had purchased a showy and unsatisfactory sideboard wholly beyond his means. It had been seized and sold for rent, and he had this burden of a few pounds debt to clear off as best he might.

“Why buy it?” I asked.

“My wife would have it,” he replied.

“Why did she want it?” I asked.

“She didn’t want it, but yon man (the shopman) seemed to _instil_ the sideboard into her.”

The shopman was a clever salesman, no doubt, but does anyone suppose he would have _instilled_ a sideboard into the workman’s wife if it had not been for imprisonment for debt. To a working-man on small weekly wages no credit can be given in any commercial sense. His only asset is character, and there are many retail traders who never come near the County Court at all, because they make it a rule only to give credit after inquiry.

Constantly one finds goods taken by women, and immediately pawned, the proceeds being spent on drink. How can a workman prevent this? He probably never hears of the matter until a judgment summons is served on him. I asked such a man the other day if his wife had had the goods, mentioning the date when they were said to be delivered.

“I don’t doubt she had the goods. Indeed, she must have got some goods that day,” he admitted.

I asked why.

“Because that day she got locked up for being drunk and disorderly, and I never knew until now where she got the money.”

This is by no means an isolated case. I have been several times applied to by quite respectable men whose wives had run up debts with as many as twelve to nineteen different drapers for relief under the power permitting of small bankruptcies. One man told me he was putting a nail in the wall, and on moving a picture he found some County Court summonses. I asked him what he did.

“I upbraided my wife,” he replied, in a rather melancholy tone, “and she ran away, and I have never seen her since.”

A creditor corroborated the fact, and it was clear that debt had destroyed that household. The man had no idea that there were any debts owing, they had been hidden from him, but he thought it right to arrange honestly enough to pay them all off. Many a man removes, or has his house sold over his head, or his wife leaves him through misunderstanding arising out of credit recklessly given for useless articles, and the law as it stands encourages this kind of thing.

Nor can it be said that the wife is always to blame. The husband finds that his wife can obtain credit at any grocer’s for the week’s food, and the necessity of carrying home his wages to the chancellor of his domestic exchequer is less apparent. The temptation to spend wages on drink or gambling is distinctly encouraged in the debtor of to-day by a system that makes credit so readily obtainable by the unthrifty and unfit.

There was a story illustrating this aspect of the matter told me by a member of a relief committee during the late war. The committee were paying women half wages whilst the men were at the front. The wife of a working-man refused a sovereign saying, “That ain’t half my man’s wages.”

It was explained that he earned forty shillings.

The honest woman shook her head. “Nay, he didn’t,” she said. “Nowt o’ sort. He never earned more than twenty-five. Twenty-three he give me, and two shillings spending money.”