In most regards, Patrick Cary's life was a chaotic one, reflecting the damage done to private individuals by the political upheavals and religious controversies of the middle years of seventeenth-century England. Cary was born at the time of Charles I's ascension. He died during the Interregnum, the interlude of Puritan government, after Charles I had been beheaded by the English people in 1649 and before Charles II was recalled from France to restore the monarchy in 1660. Cary was the tenth of eleven children born to a Royalist family whose father, Henry Cary, a courtier, was named the first viscount Falkland. In general the Cary family had a flair for writing, as demonstrated by the accumulation of dramas, poems, biography, and voluminous and vivid correspondence left by Patrick Cary's parents, some of his siblings, and several of their descendants. These works attest to the range of the Falkland family's involvement...