author of these Memoirs.

Anne, the eldest daughter of Sir John Harrison, of Balls, in the
county of Hertford, by Margaret, daughter of Robert Fanshawe, of
Fanshawe Gate Esq., great uncle of Sir Richard Fanshawe, was born in
St. Olave's, Hart Street, London, on the 25th of March 1625. Of her
education and early life she has given a pleasing description, and,
until the Civil War, her family lived in uninterrupted happiness. Her
father having warmly espoused the Royal cause, he attended the Court
to Oxford, and desired his daughters to come to him in that city,
where they endured many privations, "living in a baker's house in an
obscure street, and sleeping in a bad bed in a garret, with bad
provisions, no money, and little clothes." The picture of Oxford at
that moment is truly deplorable, and the sufferings of the royalists
appear to have been very severe, but which she describes as having
been borne "with a martyr-like cheerfulness." The offer of a Baronetcy
to her father--the only return which it was then in the power of the
Crown to bestow, for the heavy losses he had sustained--was gratefully
declined on the ground of poverty. In 1644 important changes took
place in her family, or, as she poetically expresses it, alluding to
the state of public affairs, "as the turbulence of the waves disperses
the splinters of the rock," so were they separated. Her brother
William died in consequence of a fall from his horse, which was shot
under him in a skirmish against a party of the Earl of Essex the year
before; and on the 18th of May she became the wife of Mr. Fanshawe, in
Wolvercot Church, two miles from Oxford, being then in her twentieth
year, and her husband about thirty-six. He was at that time Secretary
at War, and was promised promotion the first opportunity. The fortune
of each was in expectation: they were, she says, "truly merchant
adventurers," their whole capital being only twenty pounds; and, to