This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project
to make the world's books discoverable online.
It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject
to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books
are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often difficult to discover.
Marks, notations and other marginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the
publisher to a library and finally to you.
Usage guidelines
Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the
public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we have taken steps to
prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying.
We also ask that you:
+ Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for
personal, non-commercial purposes.
+ Refrain from automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system: If you are conducting research on machine
translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the
use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help.
+ Maintain attribution The Google "watermark" you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find
additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.
+ Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just
because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other
countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can't offer guidance on whether any specific use of
any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book's appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner
anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liability can be quite severe.
About Google Book Search
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers
discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web
at http : //books . google . com/|
M.^^'
Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe
Lady Anne Harrison Fanshawe, Sir
Richard Fanshawe, Beatrice IVIarshall, Allan Fea
Digitized fc
lOogle
Digitized by
Google
Digitized by
Google
THE CROWN LIBRARY
MEMOIRS OF LADY FANSHAWE
Digitized by
Google
Digitized by
Google
I
I
MEMOIRS OF
LADY FAN'SHAWE
WIFE OF SIR RICHARD FANSHAWE, BT.
AMBASSADOR FROM CHARLES II. TO
THE COURTS OF PORTUGAL 6? 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 m m
JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
LONDON AND NEW YORK MDCCCCV
Digitized by
Google
v^'^fi
V ^
r,
\
1 'j
Priated by Ballantvnb, Hanson & Co.
London & Edinburgh
Digitized by
Google
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 jflames of Civil War, and the reign of
an usurper succeeded by the Restoration of a dis-
credited 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 dryasdust 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
252479
^ Digitized by Google
vi Introduction
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 Ambas-
sador 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 church-
yards.
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 Mai^aret " (as Pepys
called her Grace of Newcastle) thought fitting when
she took up her fatally facile pen to endow her idol-
ised 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
Digitized by
Google
Introduction vii
of the gaUant gendeman and scholar, one of those
" very perfect gentle knights ** which that age pro-
duced ; 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
Givalier 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
bom, her education was carried on "with all the
advantages the time afforded.** She learnt French,
sin^ng 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 manage-
ment of her father*s household. With naive satis-
Digitized by
Google
viii Introduction
faction 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 daugh-
ters 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 dibdcle 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
Digitized by
Google
Introduction ix
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 ^red
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 Harri-
son 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
Digitized by VjOOQIC
Introduction
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 £10 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 ill-
ness, when a letter came from Bristol, to her "un-
speakable joy '* containing fifty gold pieces and a sum-
mons 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 f)ast,
and as she stood leaning against a tree a volley of shot
Digitized by
Google
Introduction xi
was fired to sdute her, and she narrowly escaped being
hit by a brace of bullets which struck the tree two
inches above her head.
Thus b^n 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
Digitized by
Google
xii Introduction
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 hap-
pened 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 compara-
tive 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 pas-
toral the "Pastor Fide," and various pieces from
Horace and Virgil. In Yorkshire their favourite
little daughter Nan, the "dear cpmpanion 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
Digitized by
Google
Introduction xiii
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 bic^apher was l^d beside
him in the vaidt 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 simny nature
was overcast and the merry heart saddened. But surely
Digitized by
Google
xiv Introduction
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 ilan 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.
Beatrice Marshall.
Digitized by
Google
NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS
As will be seen from the rough pedigree appended,
the Baronetcy became extinct in 1694 with Sir
Richard, Lady Fanshawe's son ; while the Vis-
countcy, which was given to this Sir Richard's uncle,
Thomas, came to an end in 17 16 with Simon, the
fifth Viscount. The knightly and lordly branches
having failed, the tail male was represented by the
Fanshawes of Jenkins^ of Parskes^ and of Great
Singleton.
The first branch became extinct in 1705, Sir
Thomas Fanshawe of Jenkins leaving no male issue,
and thus the heirlooms have descended to the two
latter branches. The representatives of both these
fiunilies possess the portraits, manuscripts, &:c., many
of which came originally from Ware Park,"*^ the
parental house of Lady Fanshawe's Royalist husband,
as well as from Jenkins and Par sloes.
But before speaking of the heirlooms it may not
^Bj the will of Sir Henry Fanshawe, who died in 1616, it
appears that some of the older pictures came from the ** gallery,"
and his hoose in Warwick Lane. He directed they should be
brought to Ware Park and remain as heirlooms.
Digitized by
Google
xvi Notes on the Illustrations
be out of place to say something of these old seats
of the Fanshawes and one or two other places men-
tioned in the Memoirs.
Par sloes i which stands partly in the parish of Bark-
ing and partly in Dagenham (Essex), is now in a very
forlorn and dilapidated condition. Alterations that
have been made from time to time, particularly the
embellishments of 1 8 14, which have somewhat given
the old mansion a Strawberry-Hill-Gothic appear-
ance, have in a measure destroyed its original character.
Yet some panelled rooms remain,and some fine carved
stone fireplaces that were removed here many years
ago from the adjacent Elizabethan mansion, Eastbury
House.*
yenkinSy the more important estate, which passed
away from the family in the early part of the
eighteenth century, was a large square moated timber
house with two towers. Remains of the old fish-
ponds and terraces may still be traced (about a mile
from Parsloes\ but nothing remains of the house or
of a later structure which followed it. Indeed, the
very name is now forgotten.
The mansion Ware Park has also long since been
pulled down and rebuilt. It was sold owing to Sir
Henry Fanshawe's losses in the Royalist cause.
Of the Derbyshire seat, Fanshawe Gate, at Holmes-
field near Dronfidd, there are still some picturesque
♦ Vide " Picturesque Old Houses."
Digitized by
Google
Notes on the Illustrations xvii
remains, and the Church of Dronfield contsuns some
good sixteenth-century brasses to the early members
of the family.
Lady Fanshawe's parental house, Balls Park, near
Hertford, though much modernised of recent years,
dates back from the reign of Charles I. By inter-
marriage the estate passed to the Townshends, and
the late Marquis sold it a few years ago.
Among the Townshend heirlooms which were
dispersed in March 1904, were many portraits of
the Harrisons, including a fine full-length of Lady
Anne's Cavalier brother, William, who died fighting
for the King in 1643.*
" Little Grove,** East Barnet, another place men-
tioned in the Memoirs y was rebuilt in 17 19, and re-
named ** New Place."
It would be interesting if the position of Lady
Fanshawe*s lodgings in Chancery Lane, **at my
cousin Young's,** could be located. The house
there that her husband rented from Sir George
Carey in 1655-6, in all probability was the same
which is mentioned in the artist George Vertue*s
MS. Collections as the old timber house that was
once the dwelling of Cardinal Wolsey. In a
* As the present owner of Balls Park, Sir G. Faudel-PKillips, was
a conspicnous purchaser at this sale, it may be presumed some of
the Harrison portraits have found their way back to their original
home.
b
Digitized by
Google
xviii Notes on the Illustrations
** great room above stairs/' he said, were carved
arms and supporters of the Carews [Careys],
who had repaired the ceilings, &c At the time
he wrote the building was used as a tavern.* The
house on the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields
known as ** The Pine Apples," where Lady Fanshawe
was living at the time of her husband's death, has
disappeared with the other old residences on that
side of the square. Nothing is said in the
tMemoirs to locate the bmlding where she met her
husband when he was brought to London a prisoner
after Worcester fight. The room in Whitehall
facing the Bowling-green of course perished in the
fire which destroyed the Palace at the end of the
seventeenth century .f
In regard to the monument of Sir Richard in
Ware Church, which was erected to his memory by
Lady Fanshawe, it is strange that there is no record
of the interment in the Register. In the Register of
All Saints Church, Hertford,^ however, it is stated
that the body was first interred in Sir John Harrison's
vaidt: — ** 1671, May 18. Sir Richard Fanshawe,
•Vide Notes and Queries. Second Series, vol xii., pp. i, 81;
also Middlesex and Hertfordshire Notes and Querie.<, vol. iii.,
p. 30.
t A description of Borstal Tower mentioned in the Memoirs yfnVL
be found in " Picturesque Old Houses,"
X The old church, including a fine monument to the Harrisons,
was completely destroyed by fire a few years ago.
Digitized by
Google
Notes on the Illustrations xix
Imbassador, was taken out of this vault and Isud in
his vault at Ware." The monument was formerly
in the Chapel at the south side of Ware Church, and
was afterwards removed to the east wall of the south
transept. No memorial marks the last resting-place
of Lady Fanshawe. She was interred in the new vault
that had been prepared for her husband under
St Mary's Chapel.
As before stated, the family portraits are now in
the possession of the descendants of the half-brothers
William * and John Fanshawe, the sons of Lady
Fanshawe*s cousin, John Fanshawe.
The portraits of the Parsloes branch remaned
in the old Essex house until some thirty years ago,
when they were removed to a town residence.
They included Lady Fanshawe's portrait (reproduced
here), the original of that engraved in her Memoirs
in 1830 (by no means too faithfully) ; portraits of
her husband Sir Richard, by Dobson f and Lely ;
Sir Simon (the rake), with Naseby Field in the back-
ground : Sir Richard's grandfather, Thomas,
Remembrancer to Queen Elizabeth ; Alice, the
second wife of Sir Richard's cousin, John of Par -
sloes (the daughter of his cousin Sir Thomas
* It was William who married Mary Sarsfield, nig Walter, the
Duke of Monmouth's sister. FiiU ^ King Monmouth."
t An interesting portrait of Sir Richard in fimcy dress hy
Dobson is at West Horsley Place.
Digitized by
Google
XX Notes on the Illustrations
Fanshawe of Jenkins^ and the mother-in-law of
the Duke of Monmouth's half-sister, Mary Walter) ; â–
Sir Richard's nephew, Thomas, the second Viscount
(in breastplate and flowing wig), and his second wife,
Lady Sarah, the daughter of Sir John Evelyn and
widow of Sir John Wray»*
The original MS. of the Memoirs (of which, thanks
to the courtesy of the owner, Mr. E. J. Fanshawe,
I am able to give an illustration) is bound in old
red leather, and bears the Fanshawe arms. It