The Verneys [Hardcover]

Adrian Tinniswood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 10, 2007

The remarkable story of one English family during the tumultuous seventeenth century, as revealed through their original letters and documents, which paint an extraordinarily accurate and detailed picture of life in England, Europe, and even the American colonies.

"To know the Verneys is to know the seventeenth century," Adrian Tinniswood writes in this brilliant new book. The Verney family's centuries-long practice of saving every piece of paper that came into their possession-amassing some 100,000 pages of family and estate letters and documents-resulted in the largest and most complete private collection of seventeenth-century correspondence in the Western world to date.

Given exclusive access to these documents, Tinniswood draws a sweeping portrait of the Verneys and the world among Buckinghamshire gentry in which they lived. In vivid detail Tinniswood introduces us to generations of the family: We meet Edmund Verney, King Charles I's standard bearer, who died in battle during the English Civil War in 1642 (his hand still clutching the king's standard). Edmund's son and heir, Ralph, struggled to hold the family together after his father's death, but lost the respect of his brothers and sisters because he alone of the family supported the Parliamentarian cause. Parliament, however, suspicious of his royalist connections, hounded him and his family into exile. Ralph's sons fared both better and worse than their father: Jack went to Syria and made a fortune, while Edmund married a girl who was rich, beautiful, and deeply in love with him-but within months of the marriage she succumbed to insanity.

Rigorously researched, intensely insightful, and alive with drama, The Verneys is narrative history at its very best: fascinating, surprising, and enthralling.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Drawing on a vast correspondence of more than 30,000 letters, British historian Tinniswood (By Permission of Heaven) tells the story of a remarkable elite English family in the 17th century. The Verneys' lives intersected with many historic events, such as the spread of empire: in 1634, for example, a dissolute and disobedient son was sent by his parents to the new English colony, Virginia. (He didn't last long, and returned home only to be packed off to the navy.) Civil war and religious reform sometimes divided the family, but Tinniswood is equally interested in narrating their private dramas: a scandalous out-of-wedlock pregnancy, coming-of-age conflicts between fathers and sons and arguments about whether one should marry for love or money. Although Tinniswood isn't afraid to reveal the less likable qualities of his protagonists, such as the men's sexual liberties, readers will find themselves genuinely enjoying the Verneys. While careful not to suggest that the Verneys were protofeminists, Tinniswood notes that the family often produced "powerful matriarchs" who were extremely capable. Throughout, Tinniswood ably explains the basics of 17th-century English politics, so that even readers unfamiliar with English history will be able to enjoy this absorbing family history. Map. (May)
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From The New Yorker

The letters of the Verney family survive as the largest and most continuous collection of personal correspondence from seventeenth-century Britain, and Tinniswood draws on them to produce a lively, almost novelistic account of an aristocratic family "with a long lineage and a habit of backing the wrong side." Their stories range from the outrageous—Sir Francis Verney, who "turned Turk" and became a pirate along the Barbary Coast; "Mad" Mary Verney, whose husband’s philandering drove her to zelotypia, or morbid jealousy—to the more familiar and heartrending: a father and son separated by political allegiances during civil war; a patriarch who worries about his children’s financial security. Tinniswood’s portraits are intimate, compelling, and deftly situated within the broader historical period, so that the turbulence of the seventeenth century is rendered as a human drama.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (May 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594489483
• ISBN-13: 978-1594489488
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,411,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Family - Why Not a Fascinating Book?, July 16, 2007

By 

MJS "Constant Reader" (New York, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Verneys (Hardcover)

This is one of those books that I wanted to love. I can't say anything negative about the writing or the scholarship on display here. It's solid, lucid and once in a while even witty. So why was this book such heavy going? I've managed to read three-quarters of it and I don't have an explanation.

The Verneys themselves are an interesting bunch. One became a pirate on the Barbary Coast. The wife of another went insane. They struggled through the turmoil of the English Civil War. And they kept every letter they ever received. With many of the same ingredients this should have been as riveting a read as Stella Tillyard's Aristocrats but for me it was not. The closest I can come to an explanation is that the Verneys actually offer too many facts. We know many of the details of their lives yet comparatively little about their inner lives.

This is a well-written book. If you are a student of the English Civil War or 17th Century England this is well worth your time. For the general history reader I would advise reading a few pages of this at random before buying.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Illuminating History, August 12, 2007

By 

J. Dyess "greenrug" (jacksonville, fl United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Verneys (Hardcover)

Well I found this a fascinating family and a revealing history of 17th century Britain. The author supplements the family letters with a through explanation of the period and the Verney's close involvement with it especially the English Civil War. Also, the book gives one a personal involvement with this delightful family. I would put the book down then quite soon be drawn back to it wondering what the Verneys were up to now. Can't get better history than this. Kudos to the author!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Opening Others' Mail, August 18, 2008

By 

Thomas M. Sullivan (Lake George, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Verneys (Hardcover)

As I finished this book, I turned to the next selection on my summer reading list, Peter Clarke's "The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire." Clarke records a comment by Winston Churchill reflecting his frustration with not being able to meet with President Roosevelt as much as he would have liked, relying on letters instead: "What an ineffectual method of conveying human thought correspondence is." While that is likely true in the abstract, even for one of Churchill's remarkable writing talents, the thought will likely not occur to you as you read "The Verneys."

I must say that I bought the book without knowing much about it, willing to take a chance because of my interest in 17th Century England. And then I was a bit distressed to realize that the work is based almost entirely on the correspondence by and among the Verney clan, a formulation that I have seen yield some very dry and much less than compelling historical accounts. I needn't have worried.

Tinniswood has done a simply remarkable job of bringing this fascinating family to life. Perhaps this is not that surprising given the fact that letters were the email of the day, and it was not only normal but expected that people wrote letters as we dash off our electronic messages, regularly more than once in a single day, and just as often as we, they were not as careful as they should have been, frequently ruing the products of their haste. Several of the Verneys, intentionally or not, enhanced the historical record by retaining drafts of their letters, so that the modern researcher has the benefit of both ends of many of the communications.

But all this is not to detract from Tinniswood's accomplishment. It's one thing to have all these documents available to you, and quite another to be able to weave them into a compelling narrative. My only cavils are that the author assumes on the part of the reader a fairly extensive knowledge of the period's major developments such as the Civil Wars and the Restoration although I'm reasonably certain that a tyro will be able to navigate. The other is the occasional insertion of editorial comments which are all the more bothersome by reason of their unpredictability and inanity.

The Verneys were not one of the preeminent English families of the period. But they were sufficiently close to, and involved in, the most significant political and commercial activities and developments of those years to fairly represent the trials and triumphs of their class. Full marks to Author Tinniswood for guiding us into their world in a most entertaining and edifying way.