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.
BEATRICE MARSHALL.
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 Viscountcy, which was given to this Sir Richard's uncle, Thomas, came to an end in 1716 with Simon, the fifth Viscount. The knightly and lordly branches having failed, the tail male was represented by the Fanshawes of Jenkins, of Parsloes, 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 families possess the portraits, manuscripts, &c., many of which came originally from Ware Park,[Footnote: By the will of Sir Henry Fanshawe, who dies in 1616, it appears that some of the older pictures came from the "gallery," and his house in Warwick Lane. He directed they should be brought to Ware Park and remain as heirlooms.] the parental house of Lady Fanshawe's Royalist husband, as well as from Jenkins and Parsloes.
But before speaking of the heirlooms it may not be out of place to say something of these old seats of the Fanshawes and one or two other places mentioned in the Memoirs.