Biography

William Johnson Temple. (1739-1796)

Son of William Temple (1710-1774), twice mayor of Berwick-upon-Tweed, and Sarah Johnson (d. ca. 1747). Brother of Robert Temple. William Johnston Temple enrolled at Edinburgh University in 1756, which is where he met Boswell. In 1765 he earned his LL.B. from Cambridge. In 1766 he was ordained a Deacon and received the rectory of Mamhead near Exeter, at which he stayed until 1776. In 1767 he married Anne Stow in Berwick-upon-Tweed. From 1770 and onwards he had occasional financial and marital difficulties and stayed with Boswell on some occasions. In 1776 he became Vicar in Gluvius, Cornwall. He and Anne had 8 children (6 boys, 2 girls). One (named after his father) died aged 18 in 1787. Anne died in 1793 and William himself died on August 13th, 1796.

William Johnson Temple was not related to Sir William Temple (1628-1699), who is occasionally mentioned in Boswell in Holland.¹ He was, however, the grandfather and great-grandfather respetively of the two archbishops of Canterbury, Frederick Temple (1821-1902) and William Temple (1881-1944)

Life with James Boswell:

Boswell met Temple (and possibly even John Johnston) in Robert Hunter's Greek class at the University of Edinburgh in 1755. They remained close friends for the rest of their life, and their collected correspondence has been published. When Boswell arrived in London in 1762 he hadn't seen Temple for two years, and there correspondence apparently had stoped. He went to visit him on November 27, 1762, but Temple wasn't there, and they didn't meet again until April 02, 1763, when their friendship was renewed for good.

External links:

• Rev William Johnson Temple - a full biography

Literature:

The Correspondence of William Johnson Temple and James Boswell was published by Yale in 1997 - it can be found via Abebooks. This wasn't the first publication of the letters, however. As early as the 1850s most of their correspondence had been printed. Apparently Temple's diary covering the years 1780-1796 was published by the Clarendon Press in 1929, but I haven't been able to find any copies of this volume.

This article was last updated at February 05 2008 12:03:56 CET

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