The 17th century is one of the more dramatic in English history, what with the Civil War, the Great Fire, the Glorious Revolution and so forth. In The Verneys (Cape, £20), Adrian Tinniswood explores it through the vicissitudes of a family of Buckinghamshire gentry - whose 30,000 letters were found in an attic.
They were a lively bunch, and none more so than Sir Francis Verney (1583-1615) who, abandoning his wife and estate, went to Morocco, where he became a pirate on the Barbary Coast and a convert to Islam, before dying penniless in Sicily. The most historically notable was Sir Edmund (1590-1642), who fell at the Battle of Edgehill, wielding the King's standard as a pike. According to family legend, Roundhead soldiers were unable to prise the standard from his cold, dead hand, so they hacked off the latter; his ghost is supposed to have haunted Claydon House, the family seat, mournfully seeking the lost extremity.
Tinniswood's narrative never coheres into a satisfactory shape, and is inclined to ramble,
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but it offers many diverting details. For instance, advised by his friends to travel light on a journey to Italy, Sir Ralph (1613-96) includes in his luggage 30 peaked nightcaps, six serge and six calico under caps, periwigs for use by day and night, black taffeta garters and two gold toothpicks. And Jack Verney (born 1640; date of death omitted) begins as a trader in Aleppo, where the behaviour of the English colonists recalls the worst excesses of the Bullingdon Club. At their drunken parties they smash everything to hand, and when there is nothing left to break, they burn their hats, wigs, coats and shirts - and are then obliged to remain in bed until new clothes have been made for them.
Sadly the author is annoyingly sloppy about titles - according knights' wives the style of earls' daughters, while leaving an earl's wife quite naked - and overall The Verneys, while fun to dip into, can be tedious to read straight through. 
FIRST POSTED MARCH 22, 2007
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