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CHAPTER 1
1643 For the Greene Sicknes
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Take of the dust of the purest Spanish Steele a Spoonfull up heapt, a Nutmeg made into fine Powder, as much weight of Anyseeds in powder finely searsed [sifted] and halfe so much Liquorish, and a quarter of a pound and two ounces of Sugar finely beaten and searst. Take as much as will lye upon a shilling in a morning fasting in Warme Beer or warme Sack [fortified wine] in three spoonfulls of either. You must not eate in two hours after, but rub, or saw, or Swing, or walke very fast. For diet refrain all Milke Meats whatsoever, and use Broths with opening herbes espetially Penny Royall, Veale and Mutton chiefly.
Early in 1643, Ann Harrison's father summoned her and her younger sister, Margaret, from their handsome new house in Hertfordshire to join him in Oxford, which had over the past winter become the wartime capital of the beleaguered king, Charles I. Dutifully they rode into the unknown, seventy miles or so through the unsettled country north-west of London, over the chalky hills and through the beech woods of the Chilterns, to his side, taking only what 'a man or two' could carry on horseback in their cloak bags.
Ann and Margaret did not question their father's order. 'We knew not at all how to act any part but obedience,' Ann wrote later of her seventeen-year-old self, using a dramatic idiom well suited to her theatre-obsessed age and narrating events that could have graced a Jacobean melodrama. Later, it is implied, she would learn to be less biddable. 'From as good a house as any gentleman of England had, we came to lie in a very bad bed in a garret, to one dish of meat, and that not the best ordered, no money, for we were as poor as Job, [and had] no clothes'. I love that single dish of 'meat ... not the best ordered'; artlessly it speaks of such privilege.
'The scene was so changed,' said Ann: not just the scenery and their costumes but the parts they were playing. From the role of cosseted and protected daughters at the pinnacle of Stuart society they had been recast as refugees, exiles in their own land. The only analogies that could help her describe their situation were Biblical. 'I began to think we should all, like Abraham, live in tents all the days of our lives.' She was right. This strange existence would become her reality.
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If, a year earlier, Ann Harrison had imagined her future, it would almost certainly have looked very much like her mother's: marriage to a man not unlike her father, from a family which had grown prosperous in the service of the crown; comfortable houses both in London and set in knot-gardens, orchards and green fields outside the city, their warm-panelled, candlelit rooms the backdrop for celebrations of future christenings and marriages as well as the grief of unavoidable funerals, man's lot on earth being to suffer as well as to be joyful.
Apart from her mother's death two years earlier, fate had been kind to Ann. 'We lived in great plenty and hospitality,' she remembered of her childhood, and no expense was spared by her doting father to equip her for life as a woman with all the responsibilities as well as privileges of gentle status. At their newly built rose-coloured brick mansion in Hertfordshire, Balls Park (see plate section), in the summer, and during the autumn and winter in London at Montague House, Bishopsgate, Ann was taught the bearing and accomplishments considered essential in the world she inhabited: to dance gracefully, to play the lute and the virginals, to sing and to speak French and to sew and embroider.
But though she 'learned as well as most did' she was, she said, 'a hoyting girl' – that is to say, a hoyden, wild and carefree. She delighted in running, skipping and riding. Although her mother's death, when she was fifteen, made her grow up, her sense of adventure would never leave her.
It was the example of her mother, Margaret Harrison, that made the young Ann 'as an offering to her memory ... [fling] away those childnesses that had formerly possessed me'. As the elder of his two daughters, she took charge of her widowed father's household. Despite her independent streak, all through her adult life, as her memoirs and receipt book demonstrate, Ann would strive to be, like Margaret, 'a loving wife, and most tender mother' and, implicitly, the final element in the triad that made up the sole acceptable vocation of a seventeenth century woman, mistress of a well-run house.
As the daughter of a rich man and future wife of another, Ann would need to do no more than expertly oversee most domestic chores, such as butter-making, everyday cookery and laundry. Perhaps the most important practical skill she would learn from her mother was household medicine. Her mother's remedies form the core of the medical section of Ann's receipt book and she must have stood at Margaret Harrison's shoulder in the stillroom of her childhood home watching her make up many of them. A stillroom (short for distillation-room) or still-house was the desirable household adornment of the day, where the mistress of the house would dry herbs, extract essences and concoct ointments and cordials. As the repository of these complex skills, a still-room demonstrated the mistress of the house's compassion, learning, status and femininity.
Only one such still-house survives, almost intact, at Ham House, just south of Richmond on the River Thames, built in the 1670s – significantly, for its female owner, who would have told her architect exactly what she wanted. Bright and well lit, with its own entrance by a side door (leading out towards the herb garden) and the original crisp, black and white chequerboard floor, it is dominated by an oven with compartments for cooking at different temperatures, a large work-table and tall, shelved, heated cupboards lining one wall. Still-room inventories list pestles and mortars of wood and stone, braziers, scales and weights, small refrigerators for cooling heated liquids, presses, bain-maries, glass funnels and bottles, containers of earthenware, brass and silver, gallypots (small glazed pots for storage), graters, strainers and sieves, chopping boards and a collection of 'queer tin vessels of many shapes with spouts at all angles' alongside a bewildering variety of potent ingredients ranging from the humble (locally gathered wild herbs and fresh eggs) to the expensive and exotic (nutmeg from the Banda Islands in Indonesia, ground pearls or olive oil from the Mediterranean) to the dangerous (opium, mercury and arsenic).
Ann would also have been given instruction in financial matters, for as a good wife she would need to administer her household with discretion and frugality. As with healthcare, this skill was too important to delegate. A rare account book survives from c.1610–13, detailing the personal expenses of Margaret Spencer (another Margaret, not Ann's mother; it was a popular name, redolent of feminine strength, harking back to that legendary fifteenth century matriarch, Margaret Beaufort) between the ages of thirteen and sixteen and kept as an educational exercise. The concern with pin-money demonstrated by this book was far from trivial. Margaret's father, reckoned one of the richest men in England and the source of her generous allowance, examined her accounts regularly, because a woman who could take responsibility for appropriate expenditure would be a valuable wife and thus a successful daughter.
Most of Margaret's spending was on clothes, a necessary expression of her status as much as frivolity or luxury – fine lawn to be made into smocks, spangled lace sewn onto ribbon, kid gloves stitched with silk flowers, velvet masks, a tall, fashionable hat of albino beaver fur from the Americas – or on looking after her wardrobe, having clothes made or expensively laundered and starched. But she also paid for lessons in dancing and playing the virginals and for small gambling debts as well as buying a 'silver thimbell' for her embroidery, a 'picktooth cass and picktooth' and, somewhat surprisingly, 'a payer of pistolls'.
It is a measure of how independent young women of gentle birth were expected to be that, in her early teens and unmarried, Margaret commissioned friends and relations with errands, requesting feathers for a hat to be sent to her from London, for example, and then tipping the servant who delivered them, or buying presents for friends and family. Gift-giving was an important social function of seventeenth century society, encompassing valuable concepts of favour and obligation: it was a skill even girls could not be too young to learn. Far from being sheltered, Margaret's account book reveals a young woman immersed in society and serving her apprenticeship to it, learning to supervise servants, sewing and reading, visiting and entertaining, attending sermons and performing private devotions, a young woman much as Ann Harrison must have been at the same age some thirty years later. Its particular poignancy today lies in the knowledge that the lessons in adulthood Margaret was learning were acquired in vain, for she would die unmarried at sixteen.
Existence was precarious in the seventeenth century. Ann was just two years older than Margaret Spencer when her world and expectations changed forever. The comfortable security of her early life was shattered in 1642 when her father, Sir John, was arrested and his house and its contents were confiscated by the Parliamentary forces hostile to his master, Charles I.
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In 1642, unable to persuade Parliament to grant him the taxes he wants and control over the army, King Charles I rides out of London and raises his banner against the men opposing him, whom he calls rebels. The Parliamentarians believe royal power should be subject to Parliament; the king's men, Royalists or Cavaliers, believe royal dignity is divinely ordained and must not be challenged. Support for Parliament against the king, warns an ominous royal proclamation that July, would 'end in a dark equal chaos of confusion'.The first inconclusive battle of the civil wars that will define the next eighteen years of British history, Edgehill, takes place that October. With neither side able to claim victory, the scene is set for a long struggle ahead.
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Ann's father, Sir John Harrison, had made a great fortune serving the king. A man of humble background and great talent from Lancashire, arriving in London with nothing but his education, he had risen through the Treasury (and an advantageous marriage) to become a loyal MP as well as the first Commissioner of Customs, a position he created. Throughout Ann's childhood, the family's main home was near the parish church of St Olave's, Hart Street (also Samuel Pepys's church, where he and his wife are buried, and indicating a similar government and businesslike milieu for John Harrison). This area of Thames-side London was within sight of the White Tower built by William the Conqueror nearly six hundred years earlier and at the heart of the city's burgeoning trading centres, excise offices and customs houses, warehouses, exchanges and sales rooms.
Sir John, whose impressive wealth and influence derived from this area, was a familiar figure in these bustling, narrow streets as one of the crown's senior officials. When sides had to be chosen – and as the diplomat Sir Thomas Roe wrote to the Elector Palatine the month after Edgehill, 'No neutrality is admitted ... Both parties resolve that those who are not with them are against them ... and all who will not are as corn between two millstones' – Harrison didn't really have a choice. He owed his fortune and his hopes for the future to his association with the crown and, unlike more established gentry or aristocratic families whose loyalties were sometimes divided, his allegiance was never in doubt. Like Lord Goring, he could truly say, 'I had all from his Majesty, and he hath all again.'
That summer of 1642, Parliamentarian forces ransacked the houses of prominent Hertfordshire Royalist families, including the Fanshawes, kinsmen of Ann's mother who lived at Ware Park just a few miles from Balls, and their relations, the Capels of Hamerton, and sent the weaponry they found stored there to their leaders in London. Ann's older brother, William Harrison, then in his early twenties, rode to join the king's army at Nottingham. Soon afterwards Parliamentary forces plundered the Harrison house in Bishopsgate and took Sir John prisoner. Pretending he needed to fetch some papers they were demanding from him 'concerning the public revenue', astute Sir John managed to evade their grasp and, summoning his daughters, left London for Oxford in early 1643, to the king's court-in-exile.
This is the historical account. From the almost prosaic tone in which Ann related it, years later, it seems likely that when her father was arrested she and her sister were safely out of the way, presumably at Balls; there is little immediacy in her version of events. No other account records Balls being searched or plundered, the word in common use at the time. Contemporary letters, however, reveal how frightening it was to watch your country splinter into civil wars even from the sidelines and how divided individuals were about how to cope with the coming conflict. Twenty-two-year-old Lord Henry Spencer (who would have been the nephew of the diligent young accountant Margaret Spencer) wrote to his wife of three years from the king's camp at Shrewsbury, where William Harrison was among his fellow officers: 'If there could be an expediency found to salve the punctilio of honour, I would not continue here an hour.' (He added with half a smile, and just a drop of puritanical distaste, that though the king was 'very cheerful ... by the bawdy discourse [of camp], I thought I had been in the drawing room [at court].')
Sir Edmund Verney, of Sir John's rather than William Harrison's generation, was equally torn. Before joining the king's army as his hereditary standard bearer he told Sir Edward Hyde, 'I do not like the quarrel and do heartily wish that the king would yield and consent to what they [the Parliamentarians] desire'. Like Sir John, though, he saw no options available to him. 'I have eaten his bread and served him near thirty years, and will do no so base thing as to forsake him; and choose rather to lose my life (which I am sure I shall do) to preserve and defend those things that are against my conscience.' His words were prophetic: he would die at Edgehill with Charles's banner in his clenched fist, still unconvinced by the cause for which he gave his life and knowing that his beloved eldest son and heir, Ralph, had chosen Parliament over the king.
Before he left his estate in Buckinghamshire, Sir Edmund had written to his steward anticipating worse times to come and instructing him to do all he could to safeguard their precious corner of England. 'I praye have a care of my howse, that roages break not into it, have stoare of bullett and powder, and gett some boddy to lodg in the howse that may defend it if need bee. Have my wagon in readiness, if I should att any time send for it; gett in all such monys as are owing you with all speede for wee shall certainly have a great warr.'
Women were by no means excluded from these agonizing debates. A family friend and neighbour from London, Lady Sydenham, wrote from the king's camp to Sir Edmund's daughter-in-law, Mary, wife of the young rebel Ralph Verney, in part to assure her that whatever choice her husband made politically their friendship would remain unaltered, in part to reassure her because 'you ded exspres a trobell in yours [letter] to me about your hosband's reselushons' and in part to question those resolutions.
i kno he has chossen the strongest part, but i cannot thinke the best, but i am confedent he dus believe tis the best, and for that he chos it. But truly my hart it stagers me that he shold not se clearly all thar [Parliament's] ways, being it tis so aparrant, for how tis for the lebberty of the subget to tacke all from thim which are not of thar mind ... Nor do i find that it is in god's lay [law], to tacke arms aganst thar lawful king.
Sir Edmund's daughter Cary Verney, newly married at fifteen and staying with her husband's family in Bedfordshire, wrote to her brother Ralph with more practical worries later in the year. 'The parlement has frittened ous [us] from Hill [house], and sinc has frittened our carreg that was comin to ous back agane, and ther it is in danger of plondarin'. Her brother-in-law's servant had been arrested by Parliamentary soldiers and n52 that he was carrying for his master taken from him; Cary begged Ralph to ask a family friend, a prominent fellow Parliamentarian, to do what he could to help, notwithstanding that her own husband of only a few months was in the king's army, on the other side. Another Verney correspondent wrote indignantly with the news that when she had sent some horses to collect her children from London they had been confiscated by Parliamentarians.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Lady Fanshawe's Receipt Book"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Lucy Moore.
Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Books Ltd.
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