It must have been a picturesque group which assembled at the altar of the little quiet country church; the joyous bride with her fair young sister and handsome father of whom she was so proud, and the genial bridegroom who was of "more than the common height of men," and so popular that every one, even the King, called him Dick. Those troublous times had reduced the fortunes of both Harrisons and Fanshawes to the lowest ebb, and the young couple started their married life on 20 pounds and the forlorn hope of their Sovereign's promise of eventual compensation. When her husband went to Bristol with the Prince of Wales, we see the young wife left at Oxford, in delicate health, with scarcely a penny and a dying first-born. She relates how she was sitting in the garden of St. John's College breathing the air for the first time after her illness, when a letter came from Bristol, to her "unspeakable joy" containing fifty gold pieces and a summons to join Mr. Fanshawe, and how there was a sound of drums beating in the roadway under the garden wall, and she went up to the Mount to see Sir Charles Lee's company of soldiers march past, and as she stood leaning against a tree a volley of shot was fired to salute her, and she narrowly escaped being hit by a brace of bullets which struck the tree two inches above her head. Thus began the long series of separations, reunions, hardships, and extraordinary adventures which this brave, fair Royalist passed through. Like Queen Henrietta Maria, she seems hardly ever to have gone to sea without being nearly "cast away." From Red Abbey in Ireland she and her babies and servants had to fly at the peril of their lives through "an unruly tumult with swords in their hands." On the Isles of Scilly she was put ashore more dead than alive, and plundered of all her possessions by the sailors. At Portsmouth she and her husband were fired upon by Dutch men-of-war, and another time they were shipwrecked in the Bay of Biscay. Yet her buoyant temperament was never crushed. She might have said with Shakespeare's Beatrice, "A star danced when I was born," so infinite was her capacity for keeping on the "windy side of care." It was the old "hoyting girl" spirit still alive in her which prompted her to borrow the cabin boy's blue thrum-cap and tarred coat for half a crown to stand beside her husband on the deck when they were threatened by a Turkish galley on their way to Spain. But it was the true womanly spirit, tender, loving, devoted, which, after the Battle of Worcester, where Sir Richard was made a prisoner, took her every morning on foot when four boomed from the steeples, along the sleeping Strand to stand beneath his prison window on the bowling-green at Whitehall. This happened during the wettest autumn that ever was known, and "the rain went in at her neck and out at her heels."