’A brilliant picture of aristocratic society in seventeenth century Scotland’ - John Keyon, The Observer
Anne, Duchess of Hamilton, was a great Scottish lady of the seventeenth century. Hamilton Palace, her home, was the most splendid of Scottish houses. This book concerns the texture of her life: what she did, read and wore, how much she paid the servants, and where she educated her children; her breakfast at home and her formal feasting.
We accompany the Duke when he goes shopping on his wife’s behalf: sympathise with his exasperation when he misread her letter and tried to buy ’sallantine’ (of which nobody had heard) instead of the fashionable furred scarf called a ’palatine’. He was charged with purchasing a mantle of ’very grave colours’, a black gown and dark coloured petticoat and returned triumphant with ’a scarlet satin petticoat trimmed with silver and gold lace, a coloured and flowered silk gown and a flowered gown trimmed with lace’. We share their troubles in bringing up their thirteen children and witness their eldest son’s headlong career to disaster; hear of the passion of another Scottish peer, Lord Crawford, for tasting fruit, of the ’noteable Nonesuch and Malcotton pears’, which he sampled at Hamilton, ’the Duchess damsons, orange apricots, white globe gooseberries and great bright redcurrants’. Rosalind Marshall’s research has been as scholarly as her findings are vivid and entertaining: to read her book is to have lived in a Scottish stately home nearly three hundred years ago.
Dr Rosalind K. Marshall, a graduate of Edinburgh University, has written widely on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, specialising in women’s history. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and research associate of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, to which she contributed more than fifty articles.
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