There is a deathless charm, despite the efforts of modern novelists
and playwrights to render it stale and hackneyed, attaching to the
middle of the seventeenth century--that period of upheaval and turmoil
which saw a stately debonnaire Court swept away by the flames of Civil
War, and the reign of an usurper succeeded by the Restoration of a
discredited and fallen dynasty.
So long as the world lasts, events such as the trial and execution of
Charles Stuart will not cease to appeal to the imagination and touch
the hearts of those at least who bring sentiment to bear on the
reading of history.
It is not to the dry-as-dust historian, however, that we go for
illuminating side-lights on this ever-fascinating time, but rather to
the pen-portraits of Clarendon, the noble canvases of Van Dyck, and
above all to the records of individual experience contained in
personal memoirs. Of these none is more charmingly and vivaciously
narrated or of greater historic value and interest than the following
memoir (first published in 1830) of Sir Richard Fanshawe, "Knight and
Baronet, one of the Masters of the Requests, Secretary of the Latin
Tongue, Burgess of the University of Cambridge, and one of His
Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council of England and Ireland, and
His Majesty's Ambassador to Portugal and Spain." It was written by his
widow in the evening of her days, after a life of storm and stress and
many romantic adventures at home and abroad, for the benefit of the
only son who survived to manhood of fourteen children, most of whom
died in their chrisom robes and whose baby bones were laid to rest in
foreign churchyards.
Two contemporaries of Lady Fanshawe, Mrs. Hutchinson and the Duchess
of Newcastle, also wrote lives of their husbands, which continue to
live as classics in our literature. But the Royalist Ambassador's wife
is incomparably more sparkling and anecdotic than the Puritan
Colonel'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) thought
fitting when she took up her fatally facile pen to endow her idolised
lord with all the virtues and all the graces and every talent under
the sun.
Yet with less lavishly laid on colours, how vivid is the portrait Lady
Fanshawe has painted for posterity of the gallant gentleman and
scholar, one of those "very perfect gentle knights" which that age
produced; loyal and religious, with the straightforward simple piety
that held unwaveringly to the Anglican Church in which he had been
born and brought up.
And of herself, too, she unconsciously presents a series of charming
pictures. The description of her girlhood is a glimpse into the
bringing up of a Cavalier maiden of quality, of the kind that is
invaluable in a reconstruction of the past from the domestic side. In
the town-house in Hart Street which her father, Sir John Harrison,
rented for the winter months from "my Lord Dingwall," where she was
born, her education was carried on "with all the advantages the time
afforded." She learnt French, singing to the lute, the virginals, and
the art of needlework, and confesses that though she was quick at
learning she was very wild and loved "riding, running and all active
pastimes."
One can picture the light-hearted "hoyting girl" breaking loose when
she found herself at Balls in Hertfordshire, where the family spent
the summer, and skipping and jumping for sheer joy at being alive. And
then we see her at fifteen suddenly sobered by the death of her
mother, a lady of "excellent beauty and good understanding," and
taking upon her young shoulders the entire management of her father's
household. With naive satisfaction she tells of how well she succeeded
and how she won the esteem of her mother's relations and friends,
being ever "ambitious to keep the best company," which she thanks God
she did all the days of her life.
Her father, like other loyal gentlemen, cheerfully suffered beggary in
the King's cause. His estates and property were confiscated and he
himself arrested. He managed to escape to Oxford, whither his
daughters followed him, to lodge over a baker's shop in a poor garret
with scarcely any clothes or money, they who had till then lived in
"great plenty and great order."
The seat of learning was strangely transformed by the presence there
of the moribund Court indulging in its last fling of gaieties and
gallantries on the eve of the debacle of Marston Moor. Soldiers
swarmed in the streets and were billeted over the college gates, and
gardens and groves were the trysting-place of courtiers and beautiful
ladies in that fair spring-time. Oxford melted down its plate for the
King and gave up its ancient halls to masques and plays for the
amusement of the Queen.
Sir John Harrison and his young daughters played their part in this
brilliant society. Mistress Anne's tender heart was moved to pity by
the "sad spectacle of war," when starving, half-naked prisoners were
marched past the windows of their lodging, but nothing could damp for
long her high spirits and girlish gaiety. We are told (not by herself,
but by the arch-gossip, old Aubrey) that in the company of Lady
Isabella Thynne, brightest star of the Stuart Court, "fine Mistress
Anne" played a practical joke on Dr. Kettle, the woman-hating
President of Trinity, who resented the intrusion of petticoats into
his garden, "dubbed Daphne by the wits." The lady in question aired
herself there in a fantastic garment cut after the pattern of the
angels, with her page and singing boy wafting perfumes and soft music
before her, an apparition not likely to soothe the gigantic, choleric
doctor. Lady Isabella and her friend Anne Harrison figure in one of
the most graphic and remarkable chapters of "John Inglesant," in which
the author has also drawn largely from these memoirs for a foundation
to one of his imaginary episodes. The girl of eighteen, full of life
and enthusiasm, was doubtless flattered at being taken up by the
fashionable Court beauty, and may have allowed herself to be led into
rather dangerous frolics, till Richard Fanshawe, a connection of her
mother's family whom she had not met before, came to wait on the King
at Christ Church. The two were thrown much together, and we may be
sure Anne's time was now claimed by one she admired even more
fervently than the eccentric Lady Isabella. Sir Richard wooed and won
his fair young kinswoman amidst the alarums of war, and they were
married at Wolvercot Church in May 1644, when the fritillaries were in
bloom along the banks of Isis and Cavaliers still made merry in the
last stronghold of a waning cause.
It must have been a picturesque group which assembled at the altar of
the little quiet country church; the joyous bride with her fair young
sister and handsome father of whom she was so proud, and the genial
bridegroom who was of "more than the common height of men," and so
popular that every one, even the King, called him Dick. Those
troublous times had reduced the fortunes of both Harrisons and
Fanshawes to the lowest ebb, and the young couple started their
married life on 20 pounds and the forlorn hope of their Sovereign's
promise of eventual compensation. When her husband went to Bristol
with the Prince of Wales, we see the young wife left at Oxford, in
delicate health, with scarcely a penny and a dying first-born. She
relates how she was sitting in the garden of St. John's College
breathing the air for the first time after her illness, when a letter
came from Bristol, to her "unspeakable joy" containing fifty gold
pieces and a summons to join Mr. Fanshawe, and how there was a sound
of drums beating in the roadway under the garden wall, and she went up
to the Mount to see Sir Charles Lee's company of soldiers march past,
and as she stood leaning against a tree a volley of shot was fired to
salute her, and she narrowly escaped being hit by a brace of bullets
which struck the tree two inches above her head.
Thus began the long series of separations, reunions, hardships, and
extraordinary adventures which this brave, fair Royalist passed
through. Like Queen Henrietta Maria, she seems hardly ever to have
gone to sea without being nearly "cast away." From Red Abbey in
Ireland she and her babies and servants had to fly at the peril of
their lives through "an unruly tumult with swords in their hands." On
the Isles of Scilly she was put ashore more dead than alive, and
plundered of all her possessions by the sailors. At Portsmouth she and
her husband were fired upon by Dutch men-of-war, and another time they
were shipwrecked in the Bay of Biscay. Yet her buoyant temperament was
never crushed. She might have said with Shakespeare's Beatrice, "A
star danced when I was born," so infinite was her capacity for keeping
on the "windy side of care."
It was the old "hoyting girl" spirit still alive in her which prompted
her to borrow the cabin boy's blue thrum-cap and tarred coat for half
a crown to stand beside her husband on the deck when they were
threatened by a Turkish galley on their way to Spain. But it was the
true womanly spirit, tender, loving, devoted, which, after the Battle
of Worcester, where Sir Richard was made a prisoner, took her every
morning on foot when four boomed from the steeples, along the sleeping
Strand to stand beneath his prison window on the bowling-green at
Whitehall. This happened during the wettest autumn that ever was
known, and "the rain went in at her neck and out at her heels."
Sir Richard was released on parole by Cromwell, and for seven years
the Fanshawes lived in comparative retirement in London and at
Tankersley, the seat of the Lord Strafford in Yorkshire. Here they
planted fruit-trees, and Sir Richard completed most of his literary
work. Even when he was walking out of doors he was seen generally with
some book in his hand, "which oftentimes was poetry." He translated
the "Lusiad" of de Camoens, Guarini's famous pastoral the "Pastor
Fide," and various pieces from Horace and Virgil. In Yorkshire their
favourite little daughter Nan, the "dear companion of her mother's
travels and sorrows," died of small-pox, and they left it for
Hertfordshire, where the news of the Protector's death reached them in
1658.
They were allowed now to join the Court in France, and the exiled King
appointed his faithful servant Dick Fanshawe Master of the Requests
and Latin Secretary. He and his wife came home with the King at the
Restoration, and her account of that gala voyage is one of the
brightest and most vivid that has survived. It seems literally to
burst with the jubilation and new hopes born by this event in a long-
distracted country.
Charles II. gave Sir Richard his portrait framed in diamonds, and sent
him first on an embassy to Portugal to negotiate his marriage, and
then appointed him to the still more important post of Ambassador to
Spain. On June 26, 1666, he died at Madrid of fever at the age of
fifty-eight.
The England to which his wife brought his body had not fulfilled the
high hopes and dreams of the Restoration. The vice, and laxity of
morals into which it was sinking, would certainly have been repugnant
to the clean-living, high-souled statesman, and we can hardly think
him unhappy in the time of his death.
He was buried with much pomp in the Church of St. Mary at Ware, and
his monument stands in a side chapel near the chancel. There, thirteen
years later, his loyal lady and sprightly biographer was laid beside
him in the vault and beneath the monument which she says: "Cost me two
hundred pounds; and here if God pleases I intend to lie myself."
An unfinished sentence gives a pathetic close to these pages, so full
of touches of humour, keen observation and racy anecdote. It would
seem as if the hand which wielded so descriptive and ready a pen had
wearied of its task; as if, at last, the sunny nature was overcast and
the merry heart saddened. But surely not another word is needed to
make the narrative more perfect. Those who first become acquainted
with it in this reprint will meet with many things less familiar than
Lady Fanshawe's moving account of her leave-taking from Charles I. at
Hampton Court, which has been quoted hundreds of times. They will be
thrilled by at least three stories of the supernatural told with the
elan and consummate simplicity that exceeds art, and they will be
charmed with the ingenuousness of the writer when she writes about
herself, and her masterly little sketches by the way of such
characters of the time as Sir Kenelm Digby and Lord Goring, son of the
Earl of Norwich. Indeed, we venture to think they cannot fail to find
the whole book delightful, because, though relating to a long-vanished
past, it is as livingly human and fresh as if written yesterday.