Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe Wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe, Bt., Ambassador from Charles II to the Courts of Portugal and Madrid. — Text and Context

A Wife's Eye for Detail

Fanshawe's descriptions of foreign places are notably concrete. Of Lisbon, she notes that the churches are “the best built, the finest adorned, and the cleanliest kept” she has ever seen, while the local wine is “rough for the most part, but very wholesome” and the corn “dark and gritty.” Such observations are not mere travelogue; they reflect the practical concerns of a woman managing a household abroad. She remarks on the quality of mules and horses, the scarcity of wood and grass, and the bad water supply—details that would matter to someone responsible for provisioning a family.

Her eye for the unusual extends to social customs. She records that the Portuguese “delight much in quintas,” country houses with fine gardens, and that the people are “generally very civil and obliging.” Yet she also notes, without elaboration, that the nation is “divided between Papists and Jews” and that “the people generally not handsome.” These blunt assessments, free of diplomatic softening, reveal a writer who values accuracy over flattery.

The Horrifying Anecdote of the Young Jewess

One of the most striking passages in the memoir concerns a girl of fourteen burned for Judaism in Lisbon. Fanshawe reports the story as told to her by nuns: the girl, taken from her condemned mother at birth and raised in a convent, “did daily scratch and whip the crucifixes, and run pins into them in private.” When discovered, she confessed and declared she would “never adore that God.”

Fanshawe does not editorialize. She presents the account without moral commentary, letting the stark facts speak. The inclusion of such an episode—tangential to her husband's diplomatic mission—suggests her willingness to record disturbing material that caught her attention. It also demonstrates her method: she collects stories from local informants, names her sources (the nuns), and sets down what she heard, leaving interpretation to the reader.

The Colepeper Vault: A Story Within a Story

After returning to England, Fanshawe relates a tale told by “many more gentlemen and persons of this town” concerning Colonel Colepeper, a local eccentric. The colonel, she writes, was involved in a plan for embalming dead bodies and had a notorious quarrel with the Earl of Devonshire. The anecdote hints at a “horrible suspicion” about a vault, though Fanshawe does not specify the accusation.

This digression illustrates her willingness to include hearsay and local gossip, framing it as a story “I cannot omit relating.” She carefully names her informants—Sir Thomas Barton, Sir Arnold Braeme, the Dean of Canterbury—giving the tale an air of credibility. The episode has no direct bearing on her husband's career, but it enriches the memoir with a sense of the strange and macabre, showing Fanshawe's interest in human peculiarity beyond the political sphere.

The Texture of Royalist Exile

Throughout the memoir, Fanshawe conveys the precariousness of life as a Royalist during the Interregnum and after the Restoration. She records precise dates of travel—setting sail on “Thursday, August 25th, 1663” and landing at Deal on “the 4th of September, our style, being Friday”—and notes the welcome from “gentlemen of Kent” who came to greet them. These details anchor her personal story in a broader historical moment.

Her prose is economical: she does not dwell on emotions but lets actions speak. The phrase “all in good health, God be praised!” after a sea voyage is typical—brief, devout, and understated. This restraint gives her memoir a documentary quality, as if she is compiling evidence for her son of what their family endured and achieved. The result is a record that feels both intimate and historically valuable.

Readers approaching these memoirs should attend to what Fanshawe chooses to include and what she omits. She is not a political analyst; her interest lies in people, places, and the oddities of experience. Her voice is that of a loyal wife and a sharp observer, one who records the burning of a child heretic and the quality of Portuguese wine with equal composure. To read her is to see the seventeenth century through the eyes of a woman who lived at its center but wrote from its margins.

Reading Lady Fanshawe’s careful records of exile and return, I thought of my grandmother’s own marginalia in her old prayer book—small, slanting notes about daily bread. It reminded me how Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume 5 (of 10) — A Reader’s Guide once let me hear a similar, steady voice keeping house against history’s noise. Both feel like letters left open on a desk.