She Had 14 Children and Survived The English Civil War!

Anne Fanshawe

Born in March 1625 in London, Anne Harrison was the daughter of Sir John Harrison, a wealthy customs farmer and ardent royalist. Raised with a lively spirit and a rigorous private education in languages, needlework, and music, Anne saw her comfortable world upended by the outbreak of the English Civil War. Forced to flee their looted estates, the family relocated in 1643 to Oxford, where King Charles I had established his wartime capital. Living in cramped, impoverished quarters, eighteen-year-old Anne married her second cousin, Sir Richard Fanshawe, in May 1644. Richard was a brilliant diplomat, Latin scholar, and secretary of war to the Prince of Wales, beginning a marriage of profound devotion and constant peril.

Over the next sixteen years, Anne followed her husband across war-torn Britain and Europe, enduring extreme danger on behalf of the Crown. While fleeing to the Scilly Isles and Jersey, she survived shipwrecks and enemy fire. On a treacherous voyage to Spain, their vessel was intercepted by Turkish pirate corsairs. Refusing to hide in the hold, Anne bribed the cabin boy with gold to borrow his jacket and cap, standing secretly on deck beside her husband armed with a cutlass until the attackers withdrew.

Her loyalty was tested to its limit following the decisive Royalist defeat at the Battle of Worcester in September 1651. Sir Richard was captured and imprisoned in a damp, isolated cell at Whitehall under constant threat of execution. Undeterred by armed parliamentary sentries, Anne walked through the streets of London every morning at four o'clock in the dark, standing beneath his window in the rain to deliver food, news, and letters through the iron grate. She tirelessly petitioned Oliver Cromwell's council, eventually securing her husband's release on medical bail by arguing his severe scurvy would prove fatal without care.

Following the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, the Fanshawes were restored to royal favor. Sir Richard was appointed British ambassador to Portugal and subsequently to Spain, making Anne an influential ambassadorial hostess at the imperial court of Madrid. Fluent in French and conversant in Spanish, Anne maintained detailed records of Iberian politics, local customs, architectural wonders, and regional recipes, creating an invaluable firsthand account of seventeenth-century diplomatic life.

Tragedy struck in June 1666 when Sir Richard suddenly contracted a violent fever and died in Madrid. Pregnant and heavily in debt due to delayed crown funding, Anne refused to leave his remains abroad. She had his body embalmed, chartered a convoy across Spain and France under perilous wartime conditions, and escorted his casket back to England for a state burial in Ware, Hertfordshire.

Throughout her life, Anne endured twenty pregnancies, burying fourteen of her children in premature graves. In 1676, she composed her vivid Memoirs, dedicating them to her sole surviving son as a testament to courage, marital devotion, and royalist survival. Anne died in January 1680 at fifty-four years of age, leaving behind one of the most compelling and intimate personal chronicles of the Stuart era.