EBOOK, MEMOIRS OF LADY FANSHAWE ***
Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team.
[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.
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