William Temple was brought up by his uncle, Dr. Henry Hammond, at the latter's rectory of Penshurst in Kent. When Hammond was sequestered from his living in 1643, Temple was sent to Bishop Stortford school, where he learnt all the Latin and Greek he ever knew; the Latin he retained, but he often regretted the loss of his Greek. On 13 Aug. 1644 he was entered as a fellow-commoner of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he remained a pupil of Ralph Cudworth for two years. Leaving Cambridge without taking any degree, in 1648 he set out for France. On his road he fell in with the son and daughter (Dorothy) of Sir Peter Osborne. Sir Peter held Guernsey for the king, and his family were ardent royalists. At an inn where they stopped in the Isle of Wight young Osborne amused himself by writing with a diamond on the window pane, ‘And Hamon was hanged on the gallows they had prepared for Mordecai.’ For this act of malignancy the party were arrested and brought before the governor; whereupon Dorothy, with ready wit and a singular confidence in the gallantry of a roundhead, took the offence upon herself, and was immediately set at liberty with her fellow-travellers. The incident made a deep impression upon Temple; he was only twenty at the time, and the lady twenty-one. A courtship was commenced, though the father of the hero was sitting in the Long parliament, while the father of the heroine was holding a command for the king. Even when the war ended and Sir Peter Osborne returned to his seat of Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the prospects of the lovers seemed scarcely less gloomy. Sir John Temple had a more advantageous alliance in view for his son. Dorothy, on her side, was besieged by many suitors. Prominent among them were Sir Justinian Isham [q. v.], her distant cousin Thomas Osborne (afterwards Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds) [q. v.], and Henry Cromwell [q. v.], the fourth son of the Protector, who made her the present of a fine Irish greyhound. Even more hostile to the match than Temple's father were Dorothy's brothers, one of whom, Henry, was vehement in his reproaches. At the close of seven years of courtship and correspondence, during which Temple was in Paris, Madrid, St. Malo, and Brussels (the city of his predilection), acquiring French and Spanish, Dorothy fell ill, and was cruelly pitted with the small-pox. Temple's constancy had now been proved enough, and on 31 Jan. 1654–5 the faithful pair were united before a justice of the peace in the parish of St. Giles's, Middlesex. At the close of 1655 they repaired to Ireland, Temple spending the next few years alternately at his father's house in Dublin and upon his own small estate in Carlow. During his seclusion he read a good deal, acquired a taste for horticulture, and ‘to please his wife’ penned some indifferent verses and translations, which were afterwards included in his ‘Works.’ A more distinctive composition of this period was a family prayer which was adapted ‘for the fanatic times when our servants were of so many different sects,’ and was designed that ‘all might join in it.’
Upon the Restoration Temple was chosen a member of the Irish convention for Carlow, and in May 1661 he was elected for the county in the Irish parliament. During a visit to England in July 1661 he was coldly introduced at court by Ormonde, but subsequently he entirely overcame Ormonde's prejudices. In May 1663, upon the prorogation of the Irish parliament, he removed to England, and settled at Sheen in a house which occupied the site of the old priory, in the neighbourhood of the Earl of Leicester's seat at Richmond (cf. Chancellor, Hist. of Richmond, 1894, p. 73). His widowed sister, Lady Giffard, came to live with the Temples during the summer, their united income amounting to between 500l. and 600l. a year. At Sheen, Temple planted an orangery and cultivated wall-fruit ‘the most exquisite nailed and trained, far better than ever I noted it’ (Evelyn).
Ormonde provided him with letters to Clarendon and Arlington, and Temple apprised Arlington of his desire to obtain a diplomatic post, subject to the condition that it should not be in Sweden or Denmark. In June 1665 he was accordingly nominated to a diplomatic mission of no little difficulty to Christopher Bernard von Ghalen, prince-bishop of Munster. The Anglo-Dutch war was in progress, and the bishop had undertaken, in consideration of a fat subsidy, to create a diversion in favour of Great Britain by invading Holland from the east. Temple was to remit the money by instalments and to expedite the bishop's performance of his part of the contract (many interesting details of the mission are given in Temple's letters to his brother, to Arlington, and others, published by Swift from the copies made by the diplomatist's secretary, Thomas Downton). The bishop was more than a match for Temple in the subtleties of statecraft. He managed on various pretexts to postpone the raid into Holland (with the states of which he was nominally at peace) until he had secured several instalments of subsidy. In the meantime Louis XIV had got wind of the conspiracy and detached twenty thousand
