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. 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 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 Ambassador 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 churchyards.

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