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En 1686, le comte de Peterborough Henry Mordaunt publiait, sous le nom de plume de Robert Halstead, un ouvrage de généalogie familiale camouflant un long texte autobiographique. Utilisant aussi bien la pratique du pedigree que la réécriture de sa propre vie, le comte mettait ainsi en place une stratégie littéraire convoquant la mémoire collective afin de justifier son parcours individuel et son ascension fulgurante à la cour du nouveau roi d’Angleterre, auquel il faisait sa cour en mettant en avant des racines catholiques et françaises réinventées. À travers la reconstruction du passé et des emprunts aux pratiques généalogiques alors à la mode en France, Henry Mordaunt mettait enfin en scène, à travers cet ouvrage, sa fidélité au souverain et à sa politique de plus en plus controversée.

In 1686, Henry Mordaunt, 2nd Earl of Peterborough, published, under the pen name of Robert Halstead, a detailed account of his family’s ancestry, amongst which he included his own autobiography. This rewriting of his own life, as well as the practice of the more traditional pedigree, were in fact part of a literary strategy to invoke the collective memory of his family as a justification for his individual career and his dazzling rise at the court of the new King of England, while putting forward his reinvented French and Catholic roots in an attempt to gain the favour of the Monarch. This reconstruction of the past, borrowing elements of the French practice of genealogy at that time, was also his way to demonstrate his unswerving loyalty to a king whose policy was becoming increasingly controversial.