Sir William Temple
William Temple was an English diplomat who negotiated the Triple Alliance and the marriage that eventually produced the Glorious Revolution, and then retired to write. Born in London in 1628 into a family of Irish office-holders, he was educated at Cambridge under Ralph Cudworth, and spent several years abroad after the civil wars. He entered diplomacy in the 1660s and made his reputation at The Hague. In 1668 he negotiated the Triple Alliance between England, the Dutch Republic and Sweden in a matter of days, checking Louis XIV's advance into the Spanish Netherlands. It was undone by Charles II's secret Treaty of Dover with France two years later, which Temple knew nothing about. He negotiated the Treaty of Westminster ending the third Anglo-Dutch war in 1674, and in 1677 arranged the marriage of Princess Mary, the heir presumptive, to William of Orange. That match placed a Protestant Dutch stadtholder in the English succession and made 1688 possible. He formed a close working relationship with William, and drafted a scheme in 1679 to reconstitute the Privy Council as a smaller body balancing court and country parties. It failed within months. He declined the secretaryship of state repeatedly and withdrew from politics after 1681, refusing to be drawn back in 1688. He settled at Moor Park in Surrey and wrote essays admired for their prose — on gardening, on ancient and modern learning, and observations on the Dutch republic. His secretary was the young Jonathan Swift, who satirised the learning controversy in The Battle of the Books. He died in 1699.
- Lived: 1628 CE – 1699 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: diplomat, writer
