The Verneys
  • Published: 15 April 2008
  • ISBN: 9781844134144
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 608
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

The Verneys

Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Aug 2011
Paperback
15 Apr 2008
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The extraordinary story of one English family in the seventeenth century: narrative social history at its best.

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

In this extraordinary saga, Adrian Tinniswood draws on tens of thousands of letters, which survived by chance in an attic, to reveal the remarkable world of the Verneys, a family of Buckinghamshire gentry in the seventeenth century.

Here is Edmund Verney, Charles I's standard bearer at Edgehill, who died still clutching the King's standard, and his children: Ralph, whose support of the Parliamentarian cause during the Civil War forced him into exile; Mun, a professional soldier who survived Cromwell's attack on Drogheda in 1649, only to be stabbed to death two days later; Mall, who fell pregnant out of wedlock, and Bess, who ran off with a clergyman. There was also Henry, who was obsessed with horse-racing; Cary, who gambled away a fortune, and Tom, a devout Christian and a petty crook.

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 fiancé. Cousin Dick was hanged at Tyburn. Jack's brother Edmund married a girl who was rich, beautiful and deeply in love with him and within months of the marriage, she lost her mind.

The Verneys is narrative history at its very best - fascinating, surprising, enthralling.
  • Published: 15 April 2008
  • ISBN: 9781844134144
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 608
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

About the author

Adrian Tinniswood

Adrian Tinniswood OBE FSA is the author of fifteen books on social and architectural history, including Behind the Throne: A Domestic History of the Royal Household; The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House Between the Wars, a New York Timesand Sunday Times bestseller; His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren and The Verneys: a True Story of Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England, which was shortlisted for the BBC/Samuel Johnson Prize. He has worked with a number of heritage organisations including the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Trust, and is currently Senior Research Fellow in History at the University of Buckingham and Visiting Fellow in Heritage and History at Bath Spa University.

portrait photo of Adrian Tinniswood

Also by Adrian Tinniswood

The Power and the Glory
Noble Ambitions
Behind the Throne
The Great Fire of London
The Long Weekend
The Rainborowes
Pirates Of Barbary
See all

Praise for The Verneys

A marvellous history. Intimate and compelling, it's an exciting tale of adventure on the high seas and a family torn apart by civil war

Daily Mail

A wonderful group portrait of an eccentric and ill-starred dynasty. Expertly handling the humorous words and unwise deeds of several generations of Verneys, Adrian Tinniswood breathes life into the turbulent history of an entire century

Ross King, author of Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling and Brunelleschi's Dome

Adrian Tinniswood's The Verneys takes us on a fascinating grand tour through a world turned upside down. It is an intimate, engaging, and richly rewarding book, showing the seventeenth century in all its splendor and brutality

David King, author of When the World Came to Town and Finding Atlantis

Wonderfully engaging...Tinniswood has brought the Verneys to life in robustly vivid style

Guardian

A compelling drama of marriage, death, madness and adventure

Stella Tillyard, Sunday Times

A fascinating and engrossing tale

Sunday Telegraph

Much more than a powerful family saga, full of spectacular rows and tearful makings-up, joyful births and tragic early deaths... A model for how biography and social history can be made to work magnificently together

Financial Times

A wonderfully immediate, intimate portrait of an age

Scotsman

Excellent

Spectator
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