The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England

by Adrian Tinniswood

Overview

The remarkable story of one English family during the tumultuous seventeenth century, as revealed through their original letters and documents.

"To know the Verneys is to know the seventeenth century," Adrian Tinniswood writes in this brilliant book. The Verney family's centuries-long practice of saving every piece of paper that came into their possession -- amassing some 100,000 pages of family and estate letters and documents -- resulted in the largest and most complete private collection of seventeenth-century correspondence in the Western world to date. They paint an incredibly accurate and detailed picture of life in England, Europe, and even the American colonies, through the everyday lives of one extraordinary family.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101652442
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/06/2008
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	592
Sales rank:	742,019
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Adrian Tinniswood is the author of His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren and Visions of Power: Ambition and Architecture from Ancient Times to the Present. He is a respected author, lecturer, and broadcaster in Britain and the United States.

Table of Contents

Map of the British Isles     xiii
Verney Family Tree     xiv
Verney Portraits     xviii
Introduction     1
Edmund and Ralph
Francis Turns Turk     15
Venturous Knights     35
Sufficient Intellectuals     57
I Will Provide     79
A Little Fading Honor     95
The Best of Men     118
Fortune's Wheel Is Ever Turning     137
This World Is Full of Changes     157
I Do Not Like the Quarrel     183
Ralph and Mary
A Strange Cruelty     205
Mischief     231
Oh My My Dear Dear     253
Giro d'Italia     273
Mun and Jack
None but Princes     299
Mend Me or End Me     319
Perfect Empress of My Heart     336
All the Physic in the World     355
She Doth Not Rave     379
The Levant Trader     396
Natural Bias     421
Good Husbandry     446
Without Escutcheons     466
He Grows Weary     490
Acknowledgments     511
Notes     513
Bibliography     545
Index     557

What People are Saying About This

Ross King

A wonderful group portrait of an eccentric and ill-starred dynasty. Expertly handling the humorous words and unwise deeds of several generations of Verneys, Adrian Tinniswood breathes life into the turbulent history of an entire century. (Ross King, author of Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling and Brunelleschi's Dome)

Editorial Reviews

A compelling drama of marriage, death, madness, adventure and travel...[a] very engaging book.

Sunday Times (UK)

Drawing on a vast correspondence of more than 30,000 letters, British historian Tinniswood (By Permission of Heaven) tells the story of a remarkable elite English family in the 17th century. The Verneys' lives intersected with many historic events, such as the spread of empire: in 1634, for example, a dissolute and disobedient son was sent by his parents to the new English colony, Virginia. (He didn't last long, and returned home only to be packed off to the navy.) Civil war and religious reform sometimes divided the family, but Tinniswood is equally interested in narrating their private dramas: a scandalous out-of-wedlock pregnancy, coming-of-age conflicts between fathers and sons and arguments about whether one should marry for love or money. Although Tinniswood isn't afraid to reveal the less likable qualities of his protagonists, such as the men's sexual liberties, readers will find themselves genuinely enjoying the Verneys. While careful not to suggest that the Verneys were protofeminists, Tinniswood notes that the family often produced "powerful matriarchs" who were extremely capable. Throughout, Tinniswood ably explains the basics of 17th-century English politics, so that even readers unfamiliar with English history will be able to enjoy this absorbing family history. Map. (May)

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Publishers Weekly

Absorbing chronicle of a prominent 17th-century English family. With characteristic aplomb, British architectural historian Tinniswood (By Permission of Heaven, 2004, etc.) adjusts his gaze to focus on the aristocratic Verneys, who had a particularly fascinating-and occasionally sordid-history. Drawing upon a treasure trove of more than 30,000 letters, the "largest and most continuous private collection of seventeenth-century correspondence in Britain," the author chronicles the lives of "apparently ordinary" members of the Buckinghamshire gentry who were, in fact, anything but ordinary. In unfalteringly lively prose, Tinniswood sorts out the complicated family history, weaving into a rich tapestry everyone from miscreant Sir Francis, a pirate and mercenary who met an untimely end far from home after renouncing his wealth and country, to staid patriarch Sir Ralph and his extended clan. Given subjects who enacted more real-life melodramas than a Restoration tragedy, the author is even afforded an opportunity to muse upon the complicated 17th-century history of mental illness. Tinniswood chronicles with great feeling young Mary Verney's descent into psychotic fits, as well as many other sad episodes documented in detail by frank family letters. These enable him to present an invaluable case study of aristocratic Stuart England's manners, customs and affairs-financial, legal and amorous. The author's admiration for the Verneys is evident on every page, as is his thorough research. Tinniswood's previous histories were occasionally didactic; this tome proves that, given the right material, he possesses a novelist's talent for storytelling. Agent: Felicity Bryan/Felicity Bryan Literary Agency

Kirkus Reviews