Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team.
[Illustration: ANNE, LADY FANSHABE
(From a painting formerly at Parsloes)]
WIFE OF SIR RICHARD FANSHAWE, BT.
AMBASSADOR FROM CHARLES II. TO
THE COURTS OF PORTUGAL & MADRID
WRITTEN BY HERSELF CONTAINING
EXTRACTS FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE
OF SIR RICHARD FANSHAWE EDITED
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BEATRICE
MARSHALL AND A NOTE UPON THE
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALLAN FEA
There is a deathless charm, despite the efforts of modern novelistsand playwrights to render it stale and hackneyed, attaching to themiddle of the seventeenth century—that period of upheaval and turmoilwhich saw a stately debonnaire Court swept away by the flames of CivilWar, and the reign of an usurper succeeded by the Restoration of adiscredited and fallen dynasty.
So long as the world lasts, events such as the trial and execution ofCharles Stuart will not cease to appeal to the imagination and touchthe hearts of those at least who bring sentiment to bear on thereading of history.
It is not to the dry-as-dust historian, however, that we go forilluminating side-lights on this ever-fascinating time, but rather tothe pen-portraits of Clarendon, the noble canvases of Van Dyck, andabove all to the records of individual experience contained inpersonal memoirs. Of these none is more charmingly and vivaciouslynarrated or of greater historic value and interest than the followingmemoir (first published in 1830) of Sir Richard Fanshawe, "Knight andBaronet, one of the Masters of the Requests, Secretary of the LatinTongue, Burgess of the University of Cambridge, and one of HisMajesty's Most Honourable Privy Council of England and Ireland, andHis Majesty's Ambassador to Portugal and Spain." It was written by hiswidow in the evening of her days, after a life of storm and stress andmany romantic adventures at home and abroad, for the benefit of theonly son who survived to manhood of fourteen children, most of whomdied in their chrisom robes and whose baby bones were laid to rest inforeign churchyards.
Two contemporaries of Lady Fanshawe, Mrs. Hutchinson and the Duchessof Newcastle, also wrote lives of their husbands, which continue tolive as classics in our literature. But the Royalist Ambassador's wifeis incomparably more sparkling and anecdotic than the PuritanColonel's, and she does not adopt the somewhat tiresome "doormat"attitude of wifely adoration towards the subject of her memoir which"Mad Margaret" (as Pepys called her Grace of Newcastle) thoughtfitting when she took up her fatally facile pen to endow her idolisedlord with all the virtues and all the graces and every talent underthe sun.
Yet with less lavishly laid on colours, how vivid is the portrait LadyFanshawe has painted for posterity of the gallant gentleman andscholar, one of those "very perfect gentle knights" which that ageproduced; loyal and religious, with the straightforward simple pietythat held unwaveringly to the Anglican Church in which he had beenborn and brought up.
And of herself, too, she unconsciously presents a series of charmingpictures. The description of her girlhood is a glimpse into thebringing up of a Cavalier maiden of quality, of the kind that isinvaluable in a reconstruction of the past from the domestic side. Inthe town-house in Hart Street which her father, Sir John Harrison,rented for the winter months from "my Lord Dingwall," where she w