Sir William Temple (9 June 1555 – 15 January 1627) was an English Ramist logician who served as the 4th Provost of Trinity College Dublin from 1609 to 1627.
He was the son of Leicestershire man Anthony Temple, whose family name was said to descend from the Knight Templars, a once powerful monastic order during the Crusades, but which was outlawed by Pope Clement V. The rituals and the secrets of the order survived and many of the Knight Templars families came to prominence in 16th-century England when Protestantism was embraced.
[2] William Temple's first sight of Ireland came as he landed at Howth, north of Dublin, in April 1599 to take up his position as secretary to the new lord lieutenant, Robert Devereux, and 2nd Earl of Essex.
It was a baptism of fire as their first great task was to suppress a major rebellion of the native Irish tribes who had now united with the Anglo-Normans.
While Essex campaigned around the country, Temple stayed behind in Dublin that summer relaying news of military deployment and successes to the Royal Court, Essex, once Queen Elizabeth's most trusted confidant and intimate advisor, now became the unappreciated and maligned viceroy falling foul of the ageing queen.
[4] He appended to the volume an elaborate epistle addressed to another Ramist, Johannes Piscator of Strasburg, professor at Herborn Academy.
In the same year, Temple contributed a long preface, in which he renewed with spirit the war on Aristotle, to the Disputatio de prima simplicium et concretorum corporum generatione, by a fellow Ramist, James Martin of Dunkeld, professor of philosophy at Turin.
In the same place there was issued in 1591 a severe criticism of both Martin's argument and Temple's preface by an Aristotelian, Andreas Libavius, in his Quaestionum Physicarum controversarum inter Peripateticos et Rameos Tractatus (Frankfort, 1591).
[2] Temple's services were next sought successively by William Davison, the queen's secretary, and Sir Thomas Smith, clerk of the privy council.
Temple's fortunes were prejudiced by Essex's fall: Sir Robert Cecil is said to have viewed him with marked disfavour.
In 1605 he brought out, with a dedication to Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, A Logicall Analysis of Twentye Select Psalmes performed by W.
[7] He is the person named Temple for whom Bacon vainly endeavoured, through Thomas Murray of the privy chamber, to procure the honour of knighthood in 1607–1608.
Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, the Chancellor of the university - despite his own rather low opinion of Temple - was induced to assent to the nomination at the request of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh.
[2] He drew up new statutes for both the college and the university, and endeavoured to obtain from King James I a new charter, extending the privileges which Queen Elizabeth I had granted in 1595.
The second son, Thomas, a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, became rector of Old Ross, in the diocese of Ferns, on 6 March 1626 – 1627.
This in effect meant that Trinity's newly educated Protestant clergy were ill-equipped and unwilling to minister in Gaelic Ireland which made a mockery of King James the Sixth's grand plan to eliminate Catholicism and replace it with Protestantism in a complete religious and cultural transformation of Irish society.