The Rainborowes, by Adrian Tinniswood – review

Adrian Tinniswood, so gifted and spirited a communicator of serious history to a wide readership, here brings a number of themes from his previous books together. The Verneys recounted the individual experiences of 17th-century members of a leading Buckinghamshire family. The Rainborowes, set in the same period, applies the same technique to a less substantial family of Londoners.

As in his study of the great fire of London in 1666, By Permission of Heaven, Tinniswood takes us into the daily life of the capital, though here his emphasis is on the suburban world of commercial enterprise and religious dissent from which the Rainborowes emerged. Tinniswood’s previous book, Pirates of Barbary, showed Europeans doing battle with the corsairs of the Mediterranean. It was in that cause that the career of the first prominent Rainborowe, William, a bold seaman and an adviser to Charles I on maritime affairs, took shape. William’s son Thomas, another seaman though a soldier too, for a time led the parliamentary navy in the civil wars, the conflict at the heart of this book, as of Tinniswood’s longer volume on the Verneys.

The Rainborowes are at once a smaller and a harder challenge. The wonderfully ample archive of the Verneys afforded Tinniswood opportunity for ambitious, thick description. He has no such resource for the Rainborowes, who to his candid dismay keep slipping below the historical radar.

He has nonetheless discovered enough to bring coherence to the record of a family whose history straddled two continents. A number of them emigrated to the New World. Thomas’s sister Martha married the famous governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop. But the emancipation of English puritanism by the Long Parliament stemmed the flow of emigration on which the colonial economy depended.