Blair Worden
TAKING SIDES
The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England
By Adrian Tinniswood (Jonathan Cape 592pp £25)

Some families are famous for their power or wealth or deeds. Others are known for their papers. The Verneys of Buckinghamshire are to the seventeenth century what the Pastons of Norfolk are to the later middle ages. They built up what Adrian Tinniswood calls 'the largest and most continuous private collection of seventeenth-century correspondence in Britain - perhaps even in the Western world'. By the time the letters were discovered in 1827, by a new owner of the family home at Claydon, the house had lost its seventeenth-century character. Today's visitor sees the building as it was extensively remodelled, with mixed success, in the eighteenth century. It is through its letters that the family lives on.

And what letters they are! There is nothing self-consciously literary about them, no posturing for posterity. Their value lies partly in their wealth of incidental detail about the society and politics of the period, but more memorably in their artless testimony to the emotional pressures of an age of revolution, when the familiar and ordered world of the county gentry was convulsed. Extensive passages of the correspondence were published with a linking narrative in the late nineteenth century, in a four-volume work of family piety, Memoirs of the Verney Family, which is where readers excited by Tinniswood's book should turn next. His quotations, chosen with delicate judgement, are of necessity highly selective. Yet only in his hands has the life of the family been so engrossingly and persuasively re-created.

He takes us across the seventeenth century, through four generations. At the centre of the book, however, there lies the man who created the family's documentary collection, Sir Ralph Verney, the squire of Claydon during the civil wars of 1642-60. Though he lived until 1696, it is the Puritan era that the documents do most to illuminate and about which Tinniswood is at his most informative. The Verneys were mainly, and sometimes intensely, royalist. Yet their letters show the inability of such labels to convey the complexity of men's choices and decisions when they were obliged to take sides. Sir Ralph's father, the courtier Sir Edmund, was the Royal Standard Bearer when Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham in 1642, the moment when the war formally began. 'Nothing', insisted Edmund, 'can free subjects from their fidelity and allegiance unto their prince.' His 'conscience', as he famously declared, was 'only concerned in honour and gratitude' to follow his royal master, for 'I have eaten his bread and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him'. Yet he seems to have had no fondness for Charles I's bid for royal absolutism, while his own conventional Protestantism was affronted by the King's high churchmanship. He was suspected of a secret sympathy for the Parliamentarian cause. If he had not died at Edgehill, the opening battle of the war, perhaps his subsequent career would have been as equivocal as his heir's proved to be.

Ralph shocked his family - not least his brother Thomas, who would die in the royal cause in Cromwell's massacre at Drogheda - by supporting Parliament when war broke out. Yet next year, 1643, the face of the conflict changed. Parliament, in dire military straits, bought the alliance of the Scots Presbyterian army by agreeing to the Solemn League and Covenant, a pledge of commitment to radical ecclesiastical reform to which Ralph, a firm Protestant but no Puritan, would not subscribe. He withdrew to a self-imposed exile on the Continent, and for the rest of the revolution strove, with mixed success, to ward off the confiscation and punitive taxation of his estates by the Roundheads. Back in London his wife Mary importuned MPs and committee-men and half-friends in the hope of securing mercy to her husband, an abasing experience shared by many women of the time. Ralph eventually returned, only to be arrested by Cromwell's Major-Generals in 1655.

Meanwhile the war had devastated the county. Claydon stands on a line, running roughly east from Oxford, where the rival armies pushed each other back and forth from garrison to garrison, village to village. The hapless inhabitants endured plunder, arbitrary taxation and military occupation by both sides, and were successively punished by the one for their recent submission to the other. Claydon was left dilapidated by the war, though it is not clear how much of the damage was owed to soldiers and how much to mismanagement of the property in the squire's absence. Things improved after Sir Ralph's return, which was followed by extensive rebuilding and an effective programme of enclosure.

Tinniswood, a shrewd and often moving portrayer of character, shows the passions of civil war tangling with the more mundane and yet inescapable preoccupations of the landed class. Political allegiances cut across or complicated the claims of kinship and property. Sir Ralph's desertion of the parliamentary cause obliged his sisters to marry beneath them, one to a wife-beater, another to a gaoled debtor, a third to a drunkard. Tinniswood has rich material, too, on that troubled component of the seventeenth-century propertied class, the younger sons, victims of the rules of primogeniture. Around the conventional rural solidity of the main Verney line there grew a succession of adventurers and miscreants. At least primogeniture fostered initiative. Commercial ventures took one of Ralph's younger brothers to the Caribbean, one of his younger sons to the Levant.

Tinniswood's learning is worn so lightly, and in a prose so conversational, that a casual reader might miss it. Professional historians have become adept at analysing the civil wars, less good at recovering their shifts of mood and atmosphere, without an alertness to which the motives and decisions of the actors are barely intelligible. Adrian Tinniswood follows Veronica Wedgwood and the recently deceased Richard Ollard in a distinguished alternative tradition, which lies outside the academic world. Whatever it may sometimes lack in argumentative penetration, it combines scholarly enterprise and precision with the power of imaginative re-creation. It is a gift that historians who write only for each other have lost.