Hopeful Prince: Sir Richard Fanshawe

Chapter 5 argues that even prior to the regicide Sir Richard Fanshawe’s primary loyalties were to Charles, Prince of Wales rather than to Charles I. Fanshawe presented himself as a Virgilian poet-counsellor and intimated that if Charles followed his advice he could succeed where his father had failed and fulfil the potential he showed to become a latter-day Augustus. Fanshawe’s translations from Virgil and Horace generally provided Charles with ethical guidance regarding the values of moderation and temperance, but elsewhere he gave more specifically political counsel. In his translations of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido and Camões’s Os Lusíadas, and their paratexts, Fanshawe advocated that Charles could best serve the royalist cause by achieving a diplomatic alliance through marriage to an Iberian princess. Fanshawe lived long enough after the Restoration to see such a marriage-alliance come to pass, but also experience the stalling of hopes for a national revival that he anticipated such an event would bring.