Memoirs : Memoir May 1676.

Format:

Book

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Notes:

AMDigital Reference:Add. MS 41161

By her own account, Ann Fanshawe's memoirs were written for the instruction of her son, Richard, to whom they are addressed. In her introductory paragraph, she describes the subject of her narrative as 'the most remarkable actions and accidents of your family, as well as those of more eminent ones of your father and my life', with the intention that 'by the example you may imitate what is applicable to your condition in the world, and endeavour to avoid those misfortunes we have passed through, if God pleases' (fol.2). More specifically, she is determined to provide Richard with a description of his father's character and achievements: 'because you were but ten months and ten days old when God took him out of this world, I will for your advantage show you him with all truth and without partiality'. The focus of the memoirs, therefore, is on Sir Richard rather than on Ann herself, though she writes movingly about several aspects of her own experience, including the loss of so many of her children. She was also keen to instil in her son a sense of pride in his Harrison as well as his Fanshawe ancestry. Vindication is another important theme. Ann clearly believed that her husband's service to the Stuarts, both during and after the Restoration, had been undervalued, and evidently wanted to make her son fully aware of how greatly his father's deserts had exceeded his rewards. The inclusion, at the end of the manuscript, of a list of Sir Richard's chaplains (fol.121v) was presumably also intended to demonstrate to the young Richard the strength and sincerity of his father's commitment to the beleaguered Church of England. The British Library manuscript of Ann Fanshawe's memoirs is a scribal copy, with corrections (most of which clarify matters of factual detail) in Ann's own hand. Also in her hand is the endorsement on fol.1v: 'Transcribed this present May 1676'. Several passages in the original manuscript have been cancelled with such thorough scoring-through that most of the cancelled passages can no longer be read; however, in each case the deleted text has been supplied, in a nineteenth-century hand, on interleaved inserts which have been bound into the volume. Fanshawe's recent editor, John Loftis, notes that these inserted passages were apparently not included by Charlotte Colman (Ann and Richard Fanshawe's great-granddaughter), who in 1766 made a transcript of the memoirs which was the ancestor of Sir Harris Nicolas's printed edition of 1829. The inserted passages do, however, appear in H. C. Fanshawe's 1907 edition of the memoirs. Loftis conjectures that the inserts may have been supplied from another copy of the memoirs, since lost. The text of the memoirs is unfinished, ending in mid-sentence, in 1671, though there is no apparent sign of damage to the volume.