Mad Dogs and Englishmen Ranulph Fiennes

An expedition round my family Hodder & Stoughton 2009 ISBN 978-0-340-92502-7 £20 386pp

Fiennes is a big name. I am happy to bear it and confess a vested interest in Ranulph Fiennes’ expedition round the family. It is a racy chronicle of the Kings and Queens of England and high ranking associates. The Fiennes story gives an angle on British history from William the Conqueror to Winston Churchill.

Celebrities are the meat of history since records link to what made popular impact at the time, besides more mundane wills, land registers and property deeds. Sir Ranulph is himself a celebrity explorer who adds colour to his family history not least by completing it from the slopes of Mount Everest. His Mad Dogs and Englishmen includes Lord Saye, signatory of Magna Carta, Jean Fiennes, Calais Burgher immortalised in the Rodin sculpture, Thomas Fiennes executed by Henry VIII, William Fiennes, the English Civil War celebrity known as Old Subtlety and Eustace Fiennes who fought in the Boer War with Winston Churchill and made his mark in Rhodesia.

Ranulph Fiennes is a military man proud to celebrate the action of his forbears at the Battles of Hastings, Crécy, Calais, Agincourt, Worcester, Culloden, Balaclava, Gallipoli and El Alamein. There are moving eye witness descriptions of some of these conflicts. Because the Fiennes trace from Boulogne they appear on both sides of Anglo-French conflicts. The family history is one of assimilation in which English Twisletons and Wykehams marry with French Fiennes.

Captain Sir Ranulph is a Fiennes with secondary Twisleton and Wykeham association. I am a Twisleton with Fiennes association through my middle name. The Twisletons associated with Ranulph trace back to our joint Yorkshire ancestry through my namesake John Twisleton who came south to make and repair gold plate for Henry VIII just before 1500. Through this tradesman’s enterprise the Twisletons rose to a manorial class complete with their own heraldry.

Over a century before, the marriage of a Fiennes to a female descendant of William of Wykeham who had bought Broughton Castle made it home to this day for the family named Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes. The current owner, Nathaniel Fiennes, 21^st Lord Saye and Sele is Ranulph’s cousin. If Twisleton history links to Yorkshire and Wykeham history to Winchester Fiennes history links to three primary centres: Boulogne in France, Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex and Broughton Castle near Banbury.

The most famous Broughton occupant is William Fiennes (1582-1662) nicknamed Old Subtlety for his role in both the ascent of Oliver Cromwell and the subsequent restoration of the monarchy. Broughton has a famous ‘small room with no ears’ where radicals met with Fiennes to plot a countering of the perceived high handedness of King Charles 1^st. This plotting led to retaliation with Prince Rupert attacking and plundering Broughton from the neighbouring Royalist Banbury Castle. Sir Ranulph honours forbear Old Subtlety as ‘chief architect of the Puritan movement to which the United States looks for its origins and to which England owes three centuries of constitutional government’.

The cover of Mad Dogs and Englishmen summarises Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes family quest as revealing among other characters ‘a murderer, a wife poisoner, a poacher, England’s greatest female traveller of the seventeenth century, an extortionist Lord High Treasurer, teen cousins who eloped, a noble lord hanged for manslaughter and another hanged for adultery with the King’s wife’. All of this makes interesting reading along with how family fortunes come and go. Broughton survived largely on the wool trade of its estate. The foresight of 18^th century Thomas Twisleton who married an heiress of the East India Company funding Broughton’s restoration contrasts with the profligacy of his successor, Regency dandy William Twisleton, who sold off even the swans on the moat. There was nothing Puritanical about this Lord Saye and Sele who once said to a man-servant, ‘Place two bottles of sherry by my bedside and call me the day after tomorrow’.

What motivates this genealogy? Ranulph Fiennes is engaging on his desire to see the vague shadows of his past come alive in print, especially the father he never met. He was conceived on his father’s last visit home from the 1943 Italian conflict. Ranulph senior died after treading on an anti-personnel mine, which provides a poignant contemporary ring given the similar nature of British fatalities in Afghanistan.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen is a book that reports mad conflicts and yet manages to do so with humour and an eye to valour. The Fiennes story draws you into British history and vice versa. It is an energetic history book that breathes the enthusiasm of its venturesome author.

The Revd Dr John Fiennes Twisleton, Horsted Keynes, West Sussex, November 2009