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

Első borító
Penguin, 2007 - 570 oldal
The remarkable story of one English family during the tumultuous seventeenth century, as revealed through their original letters and documents, which paint an extraordinarily accurate and detailed picture of life in England, Europe, and even the American colonies.

"To know the Verneys is to know the seventeenth century," Adrian Tinniswood writes in this brilliant new 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.

Given exclusive access to these documents, Tinniswood draws a sweeping portrait of the Verneys and the world among Buckinghamshire gentry in which they lived. In vivid detail Tinniswood introduces us to generations of the family: We meet Edmund Verney, King Charles I's standard bearer, who died in battle during the English Civil War in 1642 (his hand still clutching the king's standard). Edmund's son and heir, Ralph, struggled to hold the family together after his father's death, but lost the respect of his brothers and sisters because he alone of the family supported the Parliamentarian cause. Parliament, however, suspicious of his royalist connections, hounded him and his family into exile. Ralph's sons fared both better and worse than their father: Jack went to Syria and made a fortune, while Edmund married a girl who was rich, beautiful, and deeply in love with him-but within months of the marriage she succumbed to insanity.

Rigorously researched, intensely insightful, and alive with drama, The Verneysis narrative history at its very best: fascinating, surprising, and enthralling.

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Tartalomjegyzék

Map of the British Isles xi
1
Francis Turns Turk
15
Venturous Knights
35
Sufficient Intellectuals
57
A Little Fading Honor
95
The Best of Men
118
Fortunes Wheel Is Ever Turning
137
This World Is Full of Changes
157
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

IO A Strange Cruelty
205
Mischief
231
Oh My My Dear Dear
253
Giro dItalia
273
None but Princes
299
He Grows Weary
490
Acknowledgments
511
Bibliography
545
Index
557
Copyright

Más kiadások - Összes megtekintése

Gyakori szavak és kifejezések

A szerzőről (2007)

Adrian Tinniswood has lectured at several British universities, and was for many years a consultant to the National Trust on heritage education. He is the author of more than a dozen books on architectural and social history, and is known on both sides of the Atlantic as an author, lecturer, broadcaster, and respected academic.

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