Sir John Temple, his father, was Master of the Rolls and a Privy
Councillor in Ireland; he was in the confidence of Robert Sidney, Earl
of Leicester, the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. Algernon Sydney, the
Earl's son, was well known to Temple, and perhaps to Dorothy. Sir John
Temple, like his son in after life, refused to look on politics as a
game in which it was always advisable to play on the winning side, and
thus we find him opposing the Duke of Ormond in Ireland in 1643, and
suffering imprisonment as a partisan of the Parliament. In England, in
1648, when he was member for Chichester, he concurred with the
Presbyterian vote, thereby causing the more advanced section to look
askance at him, and he was turned out of the House, or _secluded_, to
use the elegant parliamentary language of the day. From that time he
lived in retirement in London until 1654, when, as we read in Dorothy's
letters, he and his son go over to Ireland. He resumed his office of
Master of the Rolls, and in August of that year was elected to the Irish
Parliament as one of the members for Leitrim, Sligo, and Roscommon.

Temple's mother was a sister of Dr. Hammond, to whom one Dr. John
Collop, a poetaster unknown in these days even by name, begins an ode--

"Seraphic Doctor, bright evangelist."

The "seraphic Doctor" was rector of Penshurst, near Tunbridge Wells, the
seat of the Sydneys. From Hammond, who was a zealous adherent of Charles
I., Temple received much of his early education. When the Parliament
drove Dr. Hammond from his living, Temple was sent to school at
Bishop-Stortford; and the rest of his early life, with an account of his
meeting with Dorothy, has been already set down for us by Macaulay.