THE VERNEYS: A True Story of Love, War and Madness in 17th-century England by Adrian Tinniswood

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Years ago, when I was starting out as a writer, the late Brian Moore, a novelist with a masterly way of keeping the reader’s attention, gave me some advice. “Stick to your characters,” he said. Biographers of single figures, though they may begin in the middle, or, like Michael Holroyd in his Lytton Strachey, at the end, have essentially one line and one life to follow. Group or family biographies, however, like this extremely enjoyable account of the Verney family of Claydon in Buckinghamshire, need to be centred on memorable, vital and significant figures. When and where to begin, when archives span centuries? Whose story to tell? How and when to end? These are structural, imaginative and formal problems the biographer grapples with before even beginning to write.

Faced with four centuries worth of Verney documents — one of the richest hauls of family archives we have — Adrian Tinniswood decides to concentrate on the 17th century. The 17th-century Verneys left 30,000 letters and have long been held up as symbols of the tension and destruction wrought by the civil war. This new account keeps that emphasis, but shifts the balance slightly, pivoting the story around Sir Ralph Verney, who was born in 1613 and died in 1696, having lived through the civil war, the Commonwealth and Protectorate, the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. The book’s most important relationships are those between Sir Ralph, a moderate parliamentarian, his father, Sir Edmund, a royalist killed at the battle of Edgehill in 1642, and Ralph’s two sons Edmund and Jack.

Around these three generations, Tinniswood weaves the lives of Sir Ralph’s nine brothers and sisters and innumerable collateral relations and family friends into a compelling drama of marriage, death, madness, adventure and travel. Sometimes he strays from the narrative path onto tempting byways of family history, especially when he writes about the spendthrifts and ne’er-do-wells such as the pirate Francis Verney, who “died a Turk” in Messina in 1615, and the leech-like fantasist Tom, whose financial failures, wild schemes and successive wives haunted the next generation. But when he sticks to his principal characters, Tinniswood’s drama is by turns homely, moving and grand. The voices of the Verneys — the women every bit as much as the men — echo down the years in their quarrels and anxieties, their overwhelming desire for family unity and advancement. Tinniswood is alive to the sound of them and their chatter and cadence. “Though ’tis my own I must needs say he is an extremely witty child,” wrote Ralph’s wife Mary about her little son Jack.

At the narrative’s solemn moments, Tinniswood sensibly lets the Verneys’ words alone. Mun Verney, killed fighting for the Crown after the siege of Drogheda, speaks for all the royalists in the family, when he writes to Ralph in 1642, “Brother, what I feared is proved too true, which is your being against the King . . . It grieves my heart to think that my father already and I, who so dearly love and esteem you, should be bound in conscience (because it is our duty to our King) to be your enemy.” Ralph was made so miserable by this letter that he never spoke, wrote to or saw either his father or his brother again.

As the temper of the times stretched beyond his moderate puritanism, he took his family into exile on the Continent. His estates were sequestered, and he did not return until 1652, after he had got them back.

But he came back alone; four children and his beloved wife had died in the time that he was in France. That death was worse than any other anguish he had suffered.

“Oh my my dear dear,” he had at first written, only able to add later, “This, oh this, far exceeds all my other misfortunes.” Henceforth, his hopes rested in his sons Edmund and Jack.

With Sir Ralph’s return from exile the Verneys’ story takes on a happier note, although death always stalks it. Like most other families, the Verneys trimmed themselves into royalists when the time came; Sir Ralph took his baronetcy from Charles II in 1661, and his sons’ lives were less blighted by ideological strictures than his own had been. Jack Verney, Ralph’s younger son, is the focus of the narrative’s second half. He was intelligent, fearless and successful, a merchant who restored the family fortunes, slid easily along with the Glorious Revolution and ended his life as Viscount Fermanagh well into the 18th century.

Tinniswood says, “To know the Verneys is to understand 17th-century England.” Nonsense — a single family cannot and should not carry the burden of a century of national history. The Verneys are not representative, but they are, in their choices and characters, themselves, and it is enough for this very engaging book and its readers that they were so.

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