Ann petitioned Cromwell in person to secure Richard’s release, and in November that year he was finally let out on bail, although it was not until 1658, seven years later, that he was able to escape to France again. To her consternation, Ann was refused a pass to travel out to join him. At Whitehall she was told that her husband had gained his liberty through trickery; ‘but for me and his children upon no conditions we should not stir’. Ann did not waste time arguing. She went to the pass office at Wallingford House, and obtained papers under her maiden name, Ann Harrison, for herself, ‘a man, a maid, and her three children’. She then shamelessly proceeded to forge the pass, changing the capital ‘H’ to two ‘f’s,* the two ‘r’s to an ‘n’ and the ‘i’ to an ‘s’, and the ‘s’ to an ‘h’, the ‘o’ to an ‘a’, and the ‘n’ to a ‘w’, ‘so completely that none could find the change’. She then hired a barge to take her family to Gravesend, and from thence a coach to Dover. Then, laughing merrily at the thought of their great escape, she and her family crossed the Channel, to Richard and freedom.
The Fanshawes’ greatest adventure of all, however, had taken place in 1650, ten years earlier, when Richard was sent on a vital diplomatic mission to Spain: he carried letters from the future Charles II to the king of Spain, Philip IV, petitioning urgent funds to help the royalist cause. Ann, as always, was by his side.
The Fanshawes set out from Galway, which was then in the throes of the plague. Not wishing to enter the town itself, they were led ‘all on the back side of town under the walls, over which people during the plague (which was not yet quite stopped) had flung out all their dung, dirt and rags, and we walked up to the middle of our legs in them’. By now covered in flea bites, they found the ship, a Dutch merchant vessel, which was to carry them as far as Málaga.
The boat was owned by ‘a most tempestuous master, a Dutchman (which is enough to say), but truly, I think the greatest beast I ever saw of his kind’. All was well until they came to the Straits of Gibraltar, where they suddenly saw a well-manned Turkish galley in full sail coming towards them. The Dutchman’s ship was so loaded with goods that his guns, all sixty of them, were useless. ‘We believed we should all be carried away as slaves,’ Ann wrote. But the ‘beast captain’ was not about to give up so easily. He called for brandy, of which he drank a good deal, called for his arms, called for his men, and cleared the decks of everyone else, ‘resolving to fight rather than to lose his ship that was worth £30,000’.
‘This was sad for us passengers,’ Ann went on, ‘but my husband bid us be sure to keep in the cabin, and no women appear, which would make the Turks think we were a man-of-war; but if they saw women they would take us for merchants and board us.’ Leaving Ann down below, Richard took up his gun, his bandoliers and his sword, and went up to the top decks, where he stood waiting with the rest of the ship’s company for the Turkish man-of-war to approach them. Ann, who despite being expressly forbidden to show herself, was merely waiting for her chance to join him, had not reckoned on the ploys of the ‘beast captain’. When she tried the door, she found she had been locked in:
I knocked and called to no purpose, until at length a cabin boy came and opened the door. I all in tears desired him to be so good as to give me his blue thrum-cap he wore, and his tarred coat, which he did, and I gave him half a crown; and putting them on, and flinging away my night’s clothes, I crept up softly and stood upon the deck by my husband’s side as free from sickness and fear as, I confess, from discretion; but it was the effect of that passion which I could never master.
The Turks were satisfied with a parley, and eventually turned and sailed away. ‘But when your father saw it convenient to retreat, looking upon me he blessed himself, and snatched me up in his arms, saying “Good God, that love can make this change!”, and though he seemingly chid me, he would laugh at it as often as he remembered that voyage.’
The most dangerous voyage of all, however, was undertaken very soon after this one on their return from Spain to France. In the Bay of Biscay their boat sailed into a storm which lasted for two days and two nights ‘in a most violent manner’. The winds were so strong that they ‘drew the vessel up from the water’, and so destroyed the boat that by the end it had neither sail nor mast left. The crew consisted of six men and a boy: ‘Whilst they had hopes of life they ran about swearing like devils, but when that failed them they ran into holes, and let the ship drive as it would,’ Ann wrote. The final blow to their chances of reaching land came when even the ship’s compass was lost, causing
such horrible lamentation as was as dismal to us as the storm past. Thus between hope and fear we past the night, they protesting to us that they knew not where they were. And truly we believed them; for with fear and drink I think they were bereft of sense. So soon as it was day, about six of the clock, the master cried out, ‘The land! The land!’ But we did not receive that news with the joy belonging to it, but sighing said, ‘God’s will be done’.
Eventually their ship ran aground and that night they all sat up
and made good cheer, for beds we had none, and we were so transported that we thought we had no need of any. But we had very good fires and Nantes white wine, and butter and milk, and walnuts and eggs, and some very bad cheese. And was this not enough, with the escape of shipwreck, to be thought better than a feast? I am sure until that hour I never knew such pleasure in eating, between which we a thousand times repeated what we had spoken when every word seemed our last.
Nothing was ever to equal the exquisite exhilaration of these two great adventures. After the Restoration the Fanshawes’ diplomatic career reverted to a distinguished but far more conventional round of appointments. Richard was officially accredited ambassador, first to the court of Portugal in 1662, and then three years later to Spain. In between the births, and deaths, of her prodigious family, Ann slipped effortlessly into the role of the ambassador’s lady, admiring Richard in all his finery as he presented his credentials, giving and receiving visits, and attending court functions; listing, with distinctly beady eye, all their silver, and plate, and fine brocades. But she would doubtless have given it all up, and endured a thousand more dangers, to be at Richard’s side.
When he died in 1666, while still serving as Charles II’s ambassador to Spain, Ann’s heart was broken. ‘O all powerful Lord God,’ she wrote in a frenzy of grief, ‘look down from heaven upon me the most distressed wretch upon earth. See me with my soul divided, my glory and my guide taken from me, and in him all my comfort in this life. See me staggering in my path. Have pity on me, O Lord, and speak peace to my disquieted soul now sinking under this great weight …’
Ann survived Richard by fourteen years, but the thought of him always made her eyes ‘gush out with tears’. In her heart, as well as in life, they had always been as one. ‘Glory to God we never had but one mind throughout our lives,’ she concludes her memoir, ‘our souls were wrapped up in each other, our aims and designs one, our loves one, and our resentments one. We so studied one the other that we knew each other’s mind by our looks; whatever was real happiness, God gave it to me in him.’9
Until well into the present century, the majority of diplomatic wives played a part which was very much an extension of the social role they would have fulfilled in England. Even Mrs Blanckley’s good works, sewing shirts for shipwrecked sailors, had perhaps more to do with her own upbringing and devout religious convictions than with any more formally imposed ethos. In the first half of the present century, however, two important changes occurred within the Foreign Office which were to affect the roles of diplomatic wives quite as much as those of their husbands.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century the Diplomatic Service had been expanding, and the introduction of salaries