Sir William Temple, Baronet

Sir William Temple, Baronet (born April 25, 1628, London, Eng.—died Jan. 27, 1699, Moor Park, Surrey, Eng.) was an English statesman and diplomat who formulated the pro-Dutch foreign policy employed intermittently during the reign of King Charles II. In addition, his thought and prose style had a great influence on many 18th-century writers, particularly on Jonathan Swift.

Temple began his diplomatic career in 1665 as a protégé of Charles II’s secretary of state, Henry Bennet (later earl of Arlington) and in 1666 was awarded a baronetcy. In 1668 Temple, as ambassador at The Hague, and Bennet negotiated the Triple Alliance between England, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and Sweden. In spite of this, England declared war on the Dutch in 1672; he negotiated the treaty ending the Dutch War (1674), and in 1677 he and the King’s chief minister, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, arranged the marriage between Charles II’s niece Princess Mary and William of Orange, stadholder of Holland (later King William III and Queen Mary II of England). Upon Danby’s fall in April 1679, Temple reorganized the Privy Council and for a time enjoyed considerable influence in the new body. Nevertheless, by 1681 he found himself out of step with Charles’s policies, and he retired from politics.

Temple’s Observations upon the United Provinces (1673) has been hailed by 20th-century scholars as a pioneer work in the sympathetic interpretation of the people of one country to those of another. The majority of his essays, however, were written after his retirement and collected for publication by Jonathan Swift, who was his secretary for most of the period from 1689 to 1699. Temple’s graceful, conversational style provided a model for Swift’s own writing, and Swift’s celebrated “Battle of the Books” is a reply to critics of Temple’s essay “Upon Ancient and Modern Learning.”

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Temple had no surviving male heir (his only son was a suicide in 1689), and the baronetcy became extinct upon his death.