The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-century England [Hardcover]

'Tinniswood gives a pungent sense of the wrangling and entangling of 17th-century life'

'Enormous flair and skill Mr Tinniswood uses...full of spectacular
rows and tearful makings-up'

'Enthralling... [Tinniswood] writes with an ease, a sympathy, a
simplicity...that makes this book extraordinary'

'It combines scholarly enterprise and precision with the power of
imaginative re-creation'

'By far the most historically assured, best told, and most
entertaining telling of the Verney saga.'

'This book hums with Tinniswood's infectious enthusiasm.'

`The rich and vivid characters of the Verneys make history not only
painless but positively pleasurable. This is a welcome return to exactly
the kind of history that has always captivated the general reader'

`an admirable work of scholarship, written with verve, style and
imagination'

`a compelling drama of marriage, death, madness, adventure and travel'

Book of the Week

'To know the Verneys is to know the seventeenth century,' writes Adrian Tinniswood in his brilliant new book - and thanks to the chance survival in an attic of tens of thousands of their letters, we know the Verneys very well indeed. By drawing on their letters, he reveals the world of this family of Buckinghamshire gentry in extraordinary detail and intimacy. Here are Edmund Verney, Charles I's standard bearer at Edgehill. He died there; all they found of him was his hand, still clutching the King's standard. Edmund left ten children, the oldest of whom, Ralph, struggled to hold the family together during the Civil War. He lost the respect of his brothers and sisters because he alone of the Verneys supported the Parliamentarian cause. Then Parliament, suspicious of royalist connections, hounded him into exile. Ralph's brother Mun was a professional soldier who survived Cromwell's attack on Drogheda in 1649, only to be stabbed to death two days later. Their sister, Mall fell pregnant out of wedlock. Bess ran off with a clergyman. Henry was obsessed with horse-racing. Cary gambled away a fortune. Tom was a devout Christian and a petty crook: packed off abroad, he kept returning to sponge off his family. The next generation led equally exciting lives. Ralph's son Jack went to Syria and made a fortune. Cousin Pen stayed at home and slept with her sister's fiance. Cousin, Dick was hanged at Tyburn. Jack's brother Edmund married a girl who was rich, beautiful and deeply in love with him. Within months of the marriage, she lost her mind. The "Verneys" is narrative history at its very best - fascinating, surprising, enthralling. It is nothing short of a triumph.

The extraordinary story of one English family in the seventeenth century: narrative social history at its best.

Adrian Tinniswood is a historian and educationalist. He lectures regularly in Britain and the US, and was for many years consultant to the National Trust on heritage education. He is the author of eleven books of social and architectural history including His Invention So Fertile, his acclaimed biography of Sir Christopher Wren. His most recent book was By Permission of Heaven: The Story of the Great Fire of London.