Whether or not they wanted to, diplomatic wives almost always led a far more active role than that of a mere camp-follower and housekeeper to their husbands. But as the example of Mrs Blanckley shows, their role often extended into many areas beyond the conventional social ones. Although it was not until 1946 that women were able to enter the Foreign Office in their own right,* in the past, when diplomats were often obliged to work with very little formal backup, they frequently used their wives as unofficial secretaries, and occasionally even as their deputies when they were occupied elsewhere. Many women, such as Mary Fraser in Japan and Isabel Burton in Brazil and later in Damascus, frequently acted as a private assistant, copying reports and even getting to grips with complicated systems of codes and ciphers. When Elizabeth McNeill married her husband John, the British agent in Persia in 1823, she took over the management of all his expenses. She was so discreet ‘that he could entirely trust her with all his diplomatic difficulties’, and was soon involved in making copies of all her husband’s letters. Their years in Persia were crucial ones as the country was an important buffer between an increasingly expansionist Russia and British India at that time. Although John McNeill was frequently away for months on end travelling the country, no one doubted that Mrs McNeill was more than capable of undertaking the more sedentary parts of his job. ‘I am more than delighted with the promptitude and ability manifested by Mrs McNeill,’ Colonel Macdonald, the envoy, wrote just a few years later in 1828; ‘we have no need of an Agent at the capital so long as she is there.’7
Even earlier, in the eighteenth century, diplomatic wives showed themselves to be equally as capable. In 1789 Torrington, the British minister in Brussels, described his wife in a letter to the Secretary of State as ‘the soul of my office’. When he came back to England he left her behind to supervise the work of his young (and of course male) chargé d’affaires. Although it was then unthinkable, for all her capabilities, that Mrs Torrington should herself have been appointed chargé, it was not unknown for women to be recommended for the less politically important post of consul. In 1752 Mr Titley, from Copenhagen, recommended the appointment, on the death of her husband, of ‘a very notable woman’, Mrs Elizabeth Fenwick, as consul in Denmark, so long as she should remain unmarried. In the event one of her sons was appointed instead, but some ten years later, in Tripoli, a Mrs White did indeed act as her husband’s unofficial successor (and was paid by the Treasury) for two years until an official, male replacement was appointed.8
In particularly remote or dangerous postings, an even closer involvement was often necessary. Felicity Wakefield was posted to Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956, when President Nasser nationalized the previously neutral canal zone. Although no one in the embassy, not even the ambassador himself, knew of the Israeli and Anglo-French plans to invade Egypt at that point, there was no doubt that the situation was serious – ‘We had a house out on the pyramids road and I remember convoys of Egyptian army vehicles going past.’ Given tank recognition charts by the secret service, she was asked to identify and count the tanks going past her house – ‘Which I did,’ she recalls with satisfaction. ‘I hid behind the curtain so that my servants didn’t know what I was doing and I drew the tanks and I counted them. I suppose they could have accused me of spying – which is just what I was doing.’
Spying was one of the very few things that Ann Fanshawe did not do for her husband, but no doubt she would have, had it been necessary – and relished it too. The marriage of Ann and Richard Fanshawe represented not only one of diplomacy’s greatest partnerships, but one of its greatest love stories. They were married in 1644, during the Civil War. Richard was thirty-five, and the Secretary of the Council of War to the Prince of Wales (the future Charles II), then a boy of fourteen. Ann herself was just nineteen. A portrait of her in later life by Sir Peter Lely shows an exquisite oval face with a long nose and soft chin. Her small mouth is slightly pursed; her dark eyes, beneath the fashionable ringlets of the day, have a faintly resigned look about them. Thick ropes of pearls are strung at her wrists and looped around her neck and shoulders over magnificent lace cuffs and collar. By not so much as a flicker of a sloe-shaped eyelid is it possible to guess at the extraordinary swashbuckling life which lay behind the exterior of this placid, conventionally fashionable matron.
Ann was the eldest daughter of Sir John Harrison of Hertfordshire. Although she was brought up with ‘all the advantages that time afforded’, learning to sew, to speak French, to sing and dance and play the lute, she was, by her own admission, ‘what we graver people call a hoyting girl’.* She learned her lessons well, ‘yet was I wild to that degree, that the hours of my beloved recreation took up too much of my time.’ Best of all she liked riding and running, ‘and all active pastimes … But to be just to myself, I never did mischief to myself or other people, nor one immodest action or would in my life, but skipping and activity was my delight.’
From a boisterous, skipping girl Ann grew up into a deeply sensual, ambitious and capable woman. From the day of her marriage at Wolver-cote church until Richard’s death in 1666, she was passionately in love with her husband. ‘I thought myself a Queen,’ she wrote, ‘and my husband so glorious a crown, that I more valued myself to be called by his name than born a princess; for I knew him very wise and very good, and his soul doted on me.’
It was only after the Restoration in 1660 that Dick Fanshawe became an officially credited diplomat, but for many years both during and after the Civil War, he acted as an envoy for the King in exile. He was very much a man of his times – highly educated, a great lover of both history and poetry, and something of a poet himself. As well as a writer of his own verses he was a translator of Horace, and of Camoëns’s The Lusiads from the Portuguese. In the memoir written for her son, also called Richard, so that he would know what manner of man his father had been, Ann describes him tenderly: ‘He was of the highest size of men, strong, and of the best proportion, his complexion sanguine, his skin exceeding fair, his hair dark brown and very curling, but not very long, his eyes grey and penetrating, his nose high, his countenance gracious and wise, his motion good, his speech clear and distinct.’ Both his ‘masters’, Charles I and Charles II, loved him greatly, ‘both for his great parts and honesty, and for his conversation, in which they took great delight’. Even after his death, Ann never stopped loving him. Throughout their life together he was her ‘North Star, that only had the power to fix me’.
Richard Fanshawe loved his wife as much as he was beloved by her. The first time they were parted after their marriage, when Richard went to Bristol on the King’s business, he was ‘extremely afflicted even to tears, though passion was against his nature’. From the very beginning he had complete trust in Ann, involving her unhesitatingly in many of his affairs. Not long after their marriage he entrusted her with his store of gold, saying to her, ‘I know that thou that keeps my heart so well will keep my fortune, which from this time I will ever put into thy hands as God shall bless me with increase.’
His trust was well-placed. During the dangerous and uncertain years of the Civil War Ann undertook a number of missions on her husband’s behalf. Alone, and almost continually pregnant (typically for those days, she bore Richard fourteen children), she travelled frequently on his business affairs: in November 1648 ‘my husband went to Paris on his master’s business, and sent for me from London. I carried him three hundred pounds of his money.’ In France she was received at the Palais Royal, and there her little daughter played with ‘the lady Henrietta’, younger sister to Charles II. This respite did not last long. Soon Richard ‘thought it convenient to send me into England again, there to try what sums I could raise, both for his subsistence abroad, and mine at home’.
But these missions were only a small taste of what was to come. After the Battle of Worcester in 1651, which finally ended the cause of Charles II in England, Richard was taken prisoner and for ten