[Sir] William Temple

Life
1628-1699; son of Sir John Temple (1632-1704), grandson of Sir William Temple (b.1555); ed. Emmanuel College; travelled in Europe; m. Dorothy Osborne, 1655; settled in Ireland and became Irish MP; moved to England and settled Sheen, 1663; unsuccessful diplomatic mission to [German] prince-bishop of Munster, 1665; envoy to Brussels; created baronet, 1666; ambassador to United Provinces (Netherlands), and there established relations with John de Witt, at the Hague; effected Triple Alliance of England, Holland, and Sweden, 1668; Hague ambassador; his plans frustrated by Charles II’s understanding with Louis XIV; withdrawn, 1670; retired to Sheen; composed Essay on the Present State of Ireland (1668) condemning ‘late settlement’, but recommending despotic severity; Essay upon the Original Nature of Government (1671), anticipating Filmer’s patriarchal theory; Observations on the Netherlands (1672); brought about marriage of William of Orange and Mary, dg. of the future James II; secretaryship of state, 1677; participated in conference but disapproved of Treaty of Nimeguen, 1679; again refused secretaryship; revived privy council, 1679; opposed Charles II arbitrary government; retired to his nectarines at Sheen; struck off Privy Council list, 1681; purchased Moor Park; took no part in Revolution but presented himself after second flight of James II; refused secretaryship; at Moor Park he employed Jonathan Swift (supposed by Denis Johnston and others an illegitimate son of his f., Sir John), who assisted him editing his own Memoirs and advised William III during his own indisposition; published two vols. of essays as Miscellanea (1680, 1692), including that on ‘Ancient and Modern Learning’; uncritically considered the Epistles to Phalaris to be genuine, commenced but did not publish a reply to Bentley; published An Introduction to the History of England (1695); Poems by Sir W.T. (priv. 1695); d. May [but see infra], bur. Westminster. DNB

Notes
Joseph Th. Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior To The Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co. 1986): Sir William Temple, ‘An Essay on the Advancement of trade in Ireland’, in The Works of Sir William Temple, 4 vols., London 1770 (vol. 3, pp.5-31), speaks of the necessity ‘to introduce, as far as can be, a vein of parsimony throughout the country, in all things that are not perfectly the native growths and manufactures.’ This in a letter to the lord lieutenant Essex. Later in the same letter he presciently warns that among Irish industries however the woollen industry ‘seems not fit to be encouraged’. [Joseph Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fíor Ghael (1986). p.349]

Gerard McCoy, ‘“Patriots, Protestants and Papists”: Religion and the Ascendancy, 1714-60’, Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, Vol. 1 No. 1 (Spring 1994), pp.105-18, remarking that Protestant writers of the period in question relied on Temple’s History of the Irish Rebellion for information about 1641, viz., that 150,000 Protestants had been victims of ‘detestable cruelties’, &c. (citing a sermon of Rev. Henry Maule before the Irish House of Lords in 1733; McCoy, p.107.)

Constantia Maxwell, The Stranger in Ireland (1954), Chap. IX, n.4, Sir William m. Dorothy Osborne in 1653, left Ireland in 1663.

W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (1984), Sir William Temple, b. London of Irish parents, afterwards spent some time in Ireland; strongly supported ancients in his essay Of Ancient and Modern Learning (1690), asserting the so-called 6th c. Letters of Phalaris to be genuine; William Wotton, Cambridge replied for the moderns, condemning the Phalaris letters as forgeries in Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694); [163] Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery published an edition (1695) supporting their authenticity, making slighting remarks about Richard Bentley, who replied trenchantly, occasioning an insolent reply from Boyle, assisted by member of Christ Church, Oxford, remarking Bentley’s ‘publick affront’; this led to Bentley’s magisterial Dissertation on the Letters of Phalaris (1699) which totally overwhelmed Boyle in terms of scholarship; the Irish historian Henry Dodwell supported Bentley in a Discourse Concerning the Time of Phalaris (1704), pleading for less bad temper. [164]

Marsh’s Library, Dublin, holds Letters to the King, the prince of Orange, the chief ministers of state and other persons, 3 vols. (London: Tim Goodwin and Benj. Tooke 1703), 8o; Miscellanea, 3 vols. (1680, 1692, and 1701); Memoirs (1692), both with the assistance of Jonathan Swift.

Muriel McCarthy & Caroline Sherwood-Smith, Hibernia Resurgens (Marsh’s Library 1994), notes that Swift recorded at the time of Temple’s death that ‘He died at one o’clock this morhing, the 27 January 1698-9 and with him all that was good and amiable among men.’