D. TEMPLE.

Temple’s son, John Temple, married in 1685 a rich heiress in France, the daughter of Monsieur Duplessis Rambouillet, a French Protestant; he brought his wife to live at his father’s house at Sheen.  After King William and Queen Mary were actually placed on the throne, Sir William Temple, in 1689, permitted his son to accept the office of Secretary at War.  For reasons now obscure and unknowable, he drowned himself in the Thames within a week of his acceptance of office, leaving this writing behind him:—­

“My folly in undertaking what I was not able to perform has done the King and kingdom a great deal of prejudice.  I wish him all happiness and abler servants than John Temple.”

The following letter was written on that occasion by Lady Temple to her nephew, Sir John Osborne.  The original of it is at Chicksands:—­

To Sir John Osborne, thanking him for his consolation on the death of her son.

SHEEN, May 6th, 1689.

Dear Nephew,—­I give you many thanks for your kind letter and the sense you have of my affliction, which truly is very great.  But since it is laid upon me by the hand of an Almighty and Gracious God, that always proportions His punishments to the support He gives with them, I may hope to bear it as a Christian ought to do, and more especially one that is conscious to herself of having many ways deserved it.  The strange revolution we have seen might well have taught me what this world is, yet it seems it was necessary that I should have a near example of the uncertainty of all human blessings, that so having no tie to the world I may the better prepare myself to leave it; and that this correction may suffice to teach me my duty must be the prayer of your affectionate aunt and humble servant,

D. TEMPLE.

During the remaining years of her life, Lady Temple was honoured, to use the conventional phrase, by the friendship of Queen Mary, and there is said to have been a continuous correspondence between them, though I can find on inquiry no trace of its existence at the present day.

Early in the year 1695, after forty years of married life, and in the sixty-seventh year of her age, she died.  She lies, with her husband and children, on the north side of the nave of Westminster Abbey, close to the little door that leads to the organ gallery.

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