A family at war

Adrian Tinniswood's biography, The Verneys, brings a 17th-century clan vividly to life, says Helen Castor

by Adrian Tinniswood
570pp, Jonathan Cape, £25

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." It's a proposition with which no historian can avoid grappling - and it lies at the heart of Adrian Tinniswood's wonderfully engaging biography of the Verneys, a family of Buckinghamshire gentry struggling to survive the vicissitudes of 17th-century upper-class life.

The documents that offer an entrée into the Verneys' world are themselves a reminder of its unfamiliarity. Without telephones or email, friends and relatives could communicate only with paper and ink, whether a scribbled note to a neighbour, a letter entrusted to one of the recently established postal routes in and out of London, or a packet confided to friendly hands for the arduous and unreliable journey overseas. (So unreliable that Jack Verney, apprenticed to a merchant trading out of the Turkish port of Iskenderun, near Aleppo, twice went more than two years without hearing from his family, and was reduced to sending dejected respects to "those of my relations that have not forgotten me".)

Luckily for us, Jack's father, Sir Ralph Verney, never knowingly discarded a piece of correspondence. Thanks to his meticulous filing and the benign neglect of his descendants, an extraordinary trove of 30,000 letters written by and to the 17th-century Verneys was found in the 1830s at the family's crumbling country pile.

In company with the rest of the 17th-century gentry, they were engaged in the complex and often contradictory tasks of attempting to preserve their family estate intact for future generations of Verneys, while at the same time spending its revenues in expansive enough style to maintain the grandeur of the family name. In an age of acutely unpredictable fertility and mortality, even the fundamental duty of the head of the family to acquire an heir and a spare was a precarious challenge. The bloodline of Sir Ralph's eldest son, Edmund, known as Mun, came to an abrupt end when his three children all died before the age of 23. Sir Ralph's father, on the other hand, had left him in charge of nine younger siblings, whose clamorous demands for the resources needed to keep afloat in the choppy waters of Stuart high society periodically threatened to capsize the family fortunes altogether.

The travails of Sir Ralph's three brothers and six sisters add soap-opera spice to the story: Henry's obsession with horse-racing; Pen's violently dysfunctional relationship with her alcoholic husband; Cary's gambling addiction; Mary's illegitimate child. Nevertheless, despite its share of hectic melodrama, the Verney saga has a profoundly human heart, in the form of the central relationships of Sir Ralph's life: those with his father, Sir Edmund, his wife Mary, and his sons Mun and Jack. Ralph and Mary were 15 and 13 years old when they married - an heir and heiress united in a carefully orchestrated dynastic merger - but they proved a deeply devoted couple until Mary's death at the age of just 34. Sir Ralph was sustained through nearly half a century of grieving widowerhood by his commitment to Mun, perpetually the heir-in-waiting (whose chronically ill wife confronted the family with the "madness" of the book's subtitle), and Jack, the "first reserve" who was forever trying to win his father's approval.

Perhaps the most moving bond of all is that between Sir Ralph, the cautious man of business, and Sir Edmund, sophisticated courtier and soldier. Son and father together confronted the terrifying challenges - personal, political and ideological - of the civil war. Devout Protestants both, their religious sympathies lay with parliament rather than the king; but Sir Edmund's sense of honour would not let him abandon a monarch to whom he had devoted his life. "I have eaten his bread, and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him," he said; "and choose rather to lose my life (which I am sure I shall do) to preserve and defend those things which are against my conscience to preserve and defend." The death he had foreseen found him in 1642 when he was hacked down on the field at Edgehill, the royal standard in his hand.

Ralph's conscience, meanwhile, had committed him to the parliamentary cause, and caused an agonising rift with his beloved father. Devastated by Sir Edmund's death, isolated within his loyalist family, suspected by parliament for his royalist connections, and alienated by the growing radicalism of parliamentary politics, he fled into a 10-year exile in France in 1643.

Tinniswood has brought the Verneys to life in robustly vivid style. The past may indeed be a foreign country, but its inhabitants turn out to be people very much like us, in all their complex and compelling humanity.

· Helen Castor's Blood and Roses is published by Faber