Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe

Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe

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Title: Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe
Author: Lady Fanshawe
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[Illustration: ANNE, LADY FANSHABE (From a painting formerly at
Parsloes)]

MEMOIRS OF LADY FANSHAWE
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

INTRODUCTION

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