Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe | Page 3

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