Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe | Page 3

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