‘All the ceremonyes and civilityes’: The Authorship of Diplomacy in the Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe

Abstract

Returning to Spain from Lisbon in 1666 after a failed attempt to negotiate a peace treaty between Spain and Portugal, the diplomat, translator, and poet Sir Richard Fanshawe wrote to his wife Ann, Lady Fanshawe (nee Harrison) at the diplomatic residence in Madrid: 'Much I have to talk, and much I have to hear then, opening my mouth and not shutting my ear, between thee and me'.1 Here, Richard acknowledges his wife as a partner integral to his diplomatic work, with whom he exchanged advice and information relating to his 1664-66 posting as ambassador ordinary to Spain. Ann's letters in turn are brimming with details concerning the political moods of the Spanish and English courts. '[T]hese few hints' prepared her husband for his return to Madrid after a two-month absence and might today be read as indicators of the considerable agency she achieved as his companion-at-arms in the cutthroat world of mid-seventeenth-century diplomacy.2 Her ability to ferret out intrigue is patently clear, as is her practised skill in strategic dissembling, both of which suggest that Ann embraced this diplomatic posting as a career through which she found personal and authorial self-definition.3The success of Richard's posting was vital for the continued good fortune of the Fanshawe family at the court of Charles II, and Ann's contribution to his embassy confirms her trusted position as guardian of the family's interests. As Barbara Harris and others have argued, early modern women of the nobility and gentry regularly participated in the public and political world of the court, partly through their contributions to the 'survival and prosperity of their families and class', which Harris identifies as a 'career' as valuable as any pursued by a man.4 Ann's interest in the fate and history of her branch of the Fanshawes is inscribed in her Memoirs, which were written in 1676 for the benefit of her only surviving son Richard and are her primary claim to posterity. Her large manuscript folio - bound in red leather, embossed with the family arms, and decorated with gold leaf - is both a monument and a lasting legacy that describes a family intimately tied to the English court from the time of Henry VIII.5 Richard, Ann's second cousin and husband whom she married in 1644 at the age of nineteen, was well-positioned to further the Fanshawes' political rise. At thirty-six, Richard had already established himself as an indispensable courtier, having been employed under Charles I as secretary to the Spanish ambassador from 1635-38 and as Remembrancer of the Exchequer in 1641, and more recently been appointed Secretary of the Council of War in Ireland to the Prince of Wales, the future Charles II. Ann's prefatory inscription to young Richard, which describes the Memoirs as a 'discourse' of 'the most remarkable actions and accidents of your family, as well as those of more eminent ones of your father and my life', accurately reflects the manuscript's aim of memorialising his parents' civil-war and Restoration contributions to the ancestral history.6The civil-war influence on the Memoirs, which has been particularly welldocumented, connects it to other women's life-writings of the period, such as those by Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and Anne Halkett. The societal breakdown associated with war appears to have contributed to the comparative freedom of action and expression evinced by these writers, and modern commentators have expressed greatest enthusiasm about this aspect of Fanshawe's work. Fanshawe's wartime adventures reveal her stepping into public and transgressive gender roles which are narratively exciting for those readers hoping to foreground her proto-feminist self-awareness.7 Yet despite praising her remarkable bravery and self-reliance during periods of extreme adversity, critics also express disappointment in the Memoirs, castigating Fanshawe for identifying too closely with her husband and relinquishing her individual subjectivity in the process. …