Isabella Thynne, brightest star of the Stuart Court, "fine Mistress
Anne" played a practical joke on Dr. Kettle, the woman-hating
President of Trinity, who resented the intrusion of petticoats into
his garden, "dubbed Daphne by the wits." The lady in question aired
herself there in a fantastic garment cut after the pattern of the
angels, with her page and singing boy wafting perfumes and soft music
before her, an apparition not likely to soothe the gigantic, choleric
doctor. Lady Isabella and her friend Anne Harrison figure in one of
the most graphic and remarkable chapters of "John Inglesant," in which
the author has also drawn largely from these memoirs for a foundation
to one of his imaginary episodes. The girl of eighteen, full of life
and enthusiasm, was doubtless flattered at being taken up by the
fashionable Court beauty, and may have allowed herself to be led into
rather dangerous frolics, till Richard Fanshawe, a connection of her
mother's family whom she had not met before, came to wait on the King
at Christ Church. The two were thrown much together, and we may be
sure Anne's time was now claimed by one she admired even more
fervently than the eccentric Lady Isabella. Sir Richard wooed and won
his fair young kinswoman amidst the alarums of war, and they were
married at Wolvercot Church in May 1644, when the fritillaries were in
bloom along the banks of Isis and Cavaliers still made merry in the
last stronghold of a waning cause.

It must have been a picturesque group which assembled at the altar of
the little quiet country church; the joyous bride with her fair young
sister and handsome father of whom she was so proud, and the genial
bridegroom who was of "more than the common height of men," and so
popular that every one, even the King, called him Dick. Those
troublous times had reduced the fortunes of both Harrisons and
Fanshawes to the lowest ebb, and the young couple started their