LIVES OF EMINENT BRITISH STATESMEN. SIR HENRY VANE THE YOUNGER. 1612-1662. HENRY VANE, the eldest son of sir Henry Vane, of Hadlow, in Kent, was born in the year 1612. His family could trace itself back to the earliest times of the English history. They sprang from Howel ap Vane, of Monmouthshire, whose son, Griffith ap Howel Vane, married Lettice, daughter of Bledwin ap Kenwyn, lord of Powis. Six generations after this mark the date of the battle of Poictiers, where the then representative of the family, Henry Vane, received knighthood on the field as the reward of great bravery. After the lapse of five more generations, one of the branches of the family altered the name to Fane, which was retained by the descendants of his second son; while the issue of his fourth son, John, who had inherited the manor of Hadlow, and other estates in Kent and elsewhere, in consequence of the eldest son dying without issue, resumed, in the second generation, the old name of Vane. * Ludlow states them to have been originally of the diocese of Durham. Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 110. The eldest son of this last named John was unwarily drawn into sir Thomas Wyatt's insurrection, but pardoned, on the score of youth, by Mary, and afterwards elected to two of Elizabeth's parliaments. Henry Vane, the father of the subject of this memoir, was his eldest grandson; and it was by him the ancient name was resumed. Sir Henry Vane the elder is described by Clarendon as a busy and a bustling man; and a rapid glance over the chief incidents of his life will show the correctness of the description. He was born in 1589, and received knighthood from James I. in 1611. He travelled afterwards for three years, and mastered many foreign languages. On his return to England, he was elected to the parliament of 1614, by the city of Carlisle, and from this period, during many years, exerted considerable influence in the cabinets of James and Charles. James had appointed him, soon after his entry into the house of commons, cofferer to the prince, who continued him in the same office on his own accession to the throne, and made him one of his privy council. In the parliaments of 1620 and 1625, he continued to sit for Carlisle; and he served in every subsequent parliament to the time of his death, having been elected for Thetford in Norfolk, Wilton in Wiltshire, and for the county of Kent. As a diplomatist, he appears justly entitled to high praise; in other matters, it may not be unjust to use the words of Clarendon, that he had "credit enough to do his business in all places, and cared for no man, otherwise than as he found it very convenient for himself."* In 1631, he had been appointed ambassador extraordinary to renew the treaty of friendship and confederacy with Christian of Denmark; and also, in a similar character, to conclude on a firm peace and alliance with Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Both these treaties were of great importance History of the Rebellion, vol. i. p. 216., Oxford, 1826 (the only correct edition). to the power and the commercial interests of England, and he concluded both auspiciously. He returned home in 1632, and in 1633 gave a princely entertainment, at his castle of Raby, to Charles, then on his way to Scotland to be crowned; as he did again on a more fatal occasion, in 1639, when the king was marching with his melancholy "expedition to Scotland," in which sir Henry Vane himself had the command of a regiIn the latter year, he was made comptroller of the household, and some months after this appointment received the highest seat in Charles's administration, that of principal secretary of state. The latter years of ment. his life associate themselves with the fortunes of his illustrious son. The mother of the famous sir Henry Vane was Frances Darcy, of an old family in Essex. She had many other children, of whom the second son, sir` George Vane, was knighted in 1640, and seated himself in retirement at Long Melton, in the county of Durham ; while Charles distinguished himself as a diplomatist under the commonwealth, when envoy to Lisbon. One of her daughters married sir Thomas Honeywood*, of Essex, a man of learning and a good soldier; another, sir Francis Vincent, of Surrey; a third married sir Thomas Liddel, of Ravensworth, an ancestor of the present earl of Ravensworth; while the eldest became the wife of sir Thomas Pelham, the ancestor of those families which are now represented by the duke of Newcastle, the earl of Chichester, and lord Yarborough. It may be worth adding, that the present earldom of Westmoreland is held by the lineal descendant of that branch of the Vane family who retained the assumed name of Fane; and that the present duke of Cleveland, William Harry Vane, is the lineal descendant of the great statesman whose life will occupy these pages. A dukedom was given, in 1832, as the reward of a dis * See Wood's Fasti Oxoniensis, part 2. p. 167., ed. Bliss. |