VANE, Sir Henry II (1613-62), of Fairlawn, Shipbourne, Kent; Belleau, Lincs.; and Raby Castle, co. Dur.

Background and early career

Very few English statesmen have been revered and reviled so fervently as Sir Henry Vane II. The only point on which his friends and enemies have generally agreed is that of his prominence in the events of the 1640s and 1650s. ‘To most of our changes’, wrote his greatest contemporary critic, the Presbyterian minister Richard Baxter, ‘he was that within the House which [Oliver] Cromwell* was without. His great zeal to drive all into war and to the highest and to cherish the sectaries, and especially in the army, made him above all men to be valued by that party [i.e. the Independents]’.88R. Baxter, Reliquiae ed. M. Silvester (1696), 75. Vane’s republican ally Edmund Ludlowe II* would refer to him after the Restoration as ‘the chief steersman of public affairs during the late wars’.89Ludlow, Voyce, 310. Of the leading Commons-men in the Long Parliament, few, if any, rivalled Vane as an orator, negotiator and spokesman. His powers of both persuasion and obfuscation were legendary.

Vane II was also exceptional, especially among his fellow ‘grandees’, for the intensity of his commitment to liberty of conscience and his willingness to dispense with any national church structure. His theological ideas and political thought, particularly during the 1630s and 1650s, have been the subject of detailed study in recent years.90M.A. Judson, The Political Thought of Sir Henry Vane the Younger (Philadelphia, 1969); D. Parnham, Sir Henry Vane, Theologian (Madison, NJ, 1997); M.P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts 1636-41 (Princeton, 2002); W.C. Gilpin, ‘Sir Henry Vane: mystical piety in the puritan revolution’, in Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys ed. J.J. Collins, M. Fishbane (Albany, 1995), 357-76; J. Coffey, ‘The martyrdom of Sir Henry Vane the younger’, in Martyrs and Martyrdom in England c.1400-1700 ed. T.S. Freeman, T.F. Mayer (Woodbridge, 2007), 221-39; H.M. Schneider, ‘Three Views of Toleration: John Milton, Roger Williams, and Sir Henry Vane the Younger’, (State Univ. of NY Ph.D. thesis, 1977); P.L. McDermott, ‘Sir Henry Vane, Junior: the Formation of a Puritan Conscience’ (Univ. of CA Santa Barbara Ph.D. thesis, 2002); R.E. Mayers, ‘Real and practicable, not imaginary and notional’, Albion, xxviii. 37-72; Parnham, ‘Reconfiguring mercy and justice’, Jnl. of Religion, lxxix. 54-85; Parnham, ‘Politics spun out of theology and prophecy’, HPT xxii. 53-83; Parnham, ‘The nurturing of righteousness’, JBS xlii. 1-34; Parnham, ‘Soul’s trial and spirit’s voice’, HLQ lxx. 365-400. Work on his parliamentary career has languished by comparison – although his name crops up regularly in general accounts of the civil-war period.91Rowe, Vane. A proper understanding of his formation as a politician has perhaps been hindered by a failure to appreciate his father’s importance in national politics under Charles I. Sir Henry Vane I’s participation and contacts at the very top flight of government – which continued beyond his fall from royal favour in 1641 – allowed Vane II to acquire the kind of first-hand experience of high office and diplomatic affairs that was denied to virtually all of his close contemporaries and certainly to men of his radical puritan persuasion.92Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’.

Vane was educated at Westminster school under its anti-Laudian headmaster, Lambert Osbaldeston.93Ath. Ox. iii. 578; Oxford DNB, ‘Lambert Osbaldeston’. The assertion that he was a contemporary at school with Sir Arthur Hesilrige* and Thomas Scot I* seems unlikely given that he was over ten years their junior.94Ath. Ox. iii. 578; Rowe, Vane, 3; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 16. ‘I was born a gentleman’, Vane would declare in his speech from the scaffold in 1662, ‘had the education, temper and spirit of a gentleman ... being (in my youthful days) inclined to the vanities of this world and to that which they call good fellowship, judging it to be the only means of accomplishing a gentleman’.95Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 87. In his mid-teens he experienced an intense spiritual crisis in which ‘God did by some signal impressions and awakening dispensations startle him into a view of the danger of his condition’.96[G. Sikes], The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane (1662), 8. ‘When my conscience was thus awakened’, he said in 1662, ‘I found my former course to be disloyalty to God, profaness and a way of sin and death, which I did with tears and bitterness bewail’.97Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 87. His first biographer, and ‘devoted disciple’, George Sikes implied that as a result of this conversion experience Vane quickly withdrew from his ‘former jolly company’. Nevertheless, Vane was still writing witty letters to his friends in his late teens, and he continued to deport himself like other fashionable gentleman of the time.98[Sikes], Sir Henry Vane, 8; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’.

Vane’s godly conscience was sufficiently well-developed by his mid-teens to disrupt the course of his gentlemanly education. Admitted at about 16 as a gentleman commoner at what was probably Oxford’s most Calvinist college, Magdalen Hall, he then failed to matriculate – apparently because he scrupled to take either the oaths of supremacy and allegiance or, more probably, the Thirty-Nine Articles.99Ath. Ox. iii. 578; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 27-30; J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry (1984), 87, 88. According to Sir Edward Hyde* (who had no reason to think or write well of Vane), he was put under the care of ‘a very worthy tutor’ at Oxford, although ‘he lived not with great exactness’ – by which Hyde meant that Vane spent more time socialising than he did studying.100Clarendon, Hist. i. 247. Not long after leaving Oxford, Vane went, or was sent by his father, to the continent, and by October 1630 he had joined the circle of English gentlemen and ‘young travellers’ that had gathered in Paris around Charles I’s cousin and bedchamber man, James Stuart, 4th duke of Lennox. Acting on Vane I’s advice, Lennox found accommodation in the city for Vane II, who was diligent in learning French and other gentlemanly ‘exercises’ under the tutelage of the ‘best masters’ that his father’s money could buy.101CSP Dom. 1629-31, pp. 345, 359, 387. Vane I may have been referring to Vane II’s studies in Paris when he claimed to have ‘bred my eldest son ... beyond seas’.102Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, ii. 114. Several contemporaries, including Hyde, claimed that Vane II had undergone a further course of study in Leiden or Geneva. But whereas Vane’s younger brother Charles is reported to have obtained an MA at the academy at Saumur – ‘the intellectual centre of French Protestantism’ – there is no evidence that Vane himself was formally admitted to or graduated from any continental university.103CSP Dom. 1635, p. 385; Strafforde Letters, i. 463; Clarendon, Hist. i. 247; Baxter, Reliquiae, 76; Rowe, Vane, 3-4; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 31-2.

In the summer of 1631, Vane joined the train of Sir Robert Anstruther, ambassador at the court of Emperor Ferdinand II in Vienna. It was probably Vane I who had secured him this assignment, not to mention ‘a large commendation of his present and promising abilities’ from the English ambassador to France, Sir Isaac Wake†. Anstruther congratulated Vane I on having so agreeable a son and assured him that as a result of Vane II’s experience in the diplomatic service ‘he will be not only a great comfort to his parents but also worthy to serve his king and country’.104SP80/7, f. 282. Vane II’s several reports to his father from Vienna and Nuremberg (where he arrived in November 1631) reveal a firm grasp of European power politics, along with deep scepticism that the Habsburgs were acting in good faith in the negotiations for restoring the Palatinate.105SP80/8, ff. 7, 17-20, 24-25v, 28, 34-35v, 44-49v, 104-5, 128. While in Nuremberg he met with an emissary of the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus – the great champion of the Protestant cause in Europe.106SP80/8, f. 104v.

Vane left for England in December 1631 or January 1632, stopping en route to spend a few days with his father, who was serving as ambassador to Gustavus Adolphus and his German allies. It was rumoured at court that Vane II had been sent back to England on an ‘extraordinary’ mission – either with letters urging Charles to give military support to Gustavus or a Spanish offer to put the German town of Frankenthal (under siege by the Swedes) into English custody, which, it was conceived, would be ‘as great an affront as can be put upon the king of Sweden by us’. On 5 February 1632, Vane wrote to his father, from London, recounting de-briefing interviews with Secretary Dorchester (Dudley Carleton†), Lord Treasurer Weston (Sir Richard Weston†) and with the king himself, who gave him ‘a gracious and attentive audience and told him he had acquitted himself well’. Vane II also reported that one of the grooms of the bedchamber, William Morray, had promised to speak with the king about appointing him a gentleman of the privy chamber (though if Morray did so it was to no effect).107SP80/8, f. 145v; CSP Ven. 1629-32, pp. 584, 587, 588; CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 266, 278, 323; T. Birch, The Ct. and Times of Charles the First (1848), ii. 163-4, 164-5.

If Vane’s piety was indeed moving in a puritan direction by the early 1630s, he gave no indication in his correspondence that he was in any way averse to the life of a courtier – as he was, for example, about pursuing a military career.108SP80/8, f. 19; Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 49. He asked Will Morray ‘to let me understand, as a friend, what he could hear that I had misbehaved myself; in that this first time of my being employed might at least be so advantageous to me as to serve for a lesson how to govern myself another time’.109SP16/211/18, f. 23v. It seemed to family friends that his sojourn abroad had wrought a ‘great improvement’ in his manners: ‘his French [is] good, his discourse discreet, his fashion comely and fair’.110CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 294. In May 1632, Vane returned to the continent with diplomatic dispatches for his father, whose negotiations with Gustavus Adolphus in Germany were drawing to an acrimonious conclusion. Before joining his father, Vane reportedly made a ‘wide circuit’ through France and Switzerland, visiting Lyon, Geneva and Zurich.111CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 328; CSP Ven. 1629-32, pp. 624, 631; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 38-9.

From student to governor of Massachusetts, 1633-8

Very little is known of Vane II’s whereabouts or activities between late 1632 and early 1634. In May 1633, the king granted Vane I a pension of £500 a year for his ‘many and faithful services’ and a pension of £300 a year to Vane II but commencing only after his father’s death.112LS3/251, pp. 70-2. In November, he was admitted at Gray’s Inn, where his father had studied in his youth.113G. Inn Admiss. 202.

It has been conjectured that if Vane II ‘obtained any significant education at a Calvinist school on the continent’ then it was in the period 1632-4 and that the institution most likely to have been graced by his presence was the academy at Saumur. Not only had his brother Charles studied there but also Vane’s mature theology would contain echoes of the distinctive brand of Calvinism propagated at Saumur, which rejected the orthodox doctrine that Christ died only for the elect.114McDermott, ‘Vane’, 39-45. By the spring of 1634, Vane was helping to manage his father’s estate at Raby, County Durham, and it was possibly at this time that he attended puritan conventicles in the area.115Acts of the High Commn. Ct. within the Diocese of Dur. ed. W.D.H. Longstaffe (Durham, 1858), 193; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 45. In about 1635, the polymath and intelligencer Samuel Hartlib referred to the ‘story of Mr Vane’s conversion’ and that the puritan minister Philip Nye ‘will get it written by himself [i.e. by Vane]’.116Hartlib Pprs. Online, 29/3/21B.

Vane II’s growing dissatisfaction with the ceremonies of the Church of England was a major factor in his decision to emigrate to New England in 1635. In the summer of that year he obtained, though his father, a royal licence to travel to New England and to remain there for up to three years.117CSP Dom. 1635, p. 261; Jnl. of John Winthrop ed. R.S. Dunn, J. Savage, L. Yeandle (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 157. Vane I, who was entirely conformable to the Church of England and apparently not averse to some of the Laudian ceremonial ‘innovations’ that so concerned Vane II and other puritans, was deeply dismayed at his son’s decision and at the company he was keeping as a result. In July 1635, Vane II wrote to his father from the family residence in Charing Cross, pleading for

an assurance from yourself that you have really resolved this place [New England] for me to go to ... Sir, believe this from one that hath the honour to be your son (though, as the case stands, judged to be a most unworthy one) that howsomever you may be jealous of circumventions and plots that I entertain and practice, yet that I will never do anything (by God’s grace) which both with honour and a good conscience I my not justify or be content most willingly to suffer for.118SP16/293/63, f. 130.

By ‘circumventions and plots’ he may well have meant his dealings with the godly grandees William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele and Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke†, two of the principal patentees of the most uncompromisingly puritan of the Caroline plantations – Saybrook. Among the other godly notables involved in this venture were Sir William Boynton*, Sir William Constable*, Sir Arthur Hesilrige*, Henry Darley* and George Fenwick*. At about the time that Vane wrote to his father, he and Independent minister Hugh Peters were commissioned as agents to help oversee the establishment of the Saybrook colony at the mouth of the Connecticut river under its designated governor, John Winthrop junior – the son of New England’s most influential colonist, John Winthrop.119Winthrop, Hist. of New England ed. Savage, i. 477-8; Winthrop Pprs. (Mass. Hist. Soc.), iii. 198-9; K.A. Kupperman, Providence Is. 1630-41 (Cambridge, 1993), 327-8; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 63. According to a correspondent of Lord Deputy Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford), Vane II had been encouraged in his decision to emigrate by Sir Nathaniel Rich† and John Pym*, who were closely associated with Saye and Brooke in the Providence Island Company, which brought together many of the nation’s foremost godly figures.120Strafforde Letters, i. 463. In court circles, it was apparently assumed that Vane was leaving England ‘for conscience’s sake. He likes not the discipline of the Church of England. None of our ministers would give him the sacrament standing. No persuasion of our bishops nor authority of his parents could prevail with him’.121CSP Dom. 1635, p. 385. But this was probably to trivialise Vane’s motive for emigrating, for, like other puritan gentry, he would have had little difficulty finding a congregation where he could receive communion to his liking. The congenial religious environment of New England would certainly have attracted him, but ‘he may also have been responding to the temptation of an adventure as the agent of powerful men’.122McDermott, ‘Vane’, 52, 56.

Vane, Peters and Winthrop junior took ship together across the Atlantic, arriving at Boston, Massachusetts, on 6 October 1635, whereupon Vane took lodgings in the house of the town’s foremost preacher and theologian, John Cotton.123Jnl. of John Winthrop ed. Dunn, Savage, Yeandle, 157; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 61. As the son of a member of Charles’s inner counsels, Vane was easily the most illustrious person to visit Massachusetts in the 1630s, and his influential connections and zeal ‘to enjoy the ordinances of Christ in their purity’ ensured that he was received there with open arms. Admitted a member of the church of Boston in November 1635, he became a freeman of the Massachusetts corporation (known as the General Court) on 3 March 1636 and was elected governor of the colony on 25 March.124Winthrop, Hist. of New England ed. Savage, i. 222; ii. 446; Jnl. of John Winthrop ed. Dunn, Savage, Yeandle, 158; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 62-3.

One of Vane’s first acts as governor of Massachusetts was to circumvent the objections of Boston’s ministers and magistrates to flying the king’s colours – bearing the ‘popish’ cross of St George – over the town’s fort.125Jnl. of John Winthrop ed. Dunn, Savage, Yeandle, 178. With his diplomatic experience and his familiarity with court politics he would have had greater insight than the colonists into how badly the king and Archbishop William Laud would react to such puritan lèse-majesté. If word of the colonists’ disloyalty reached England it would damage not only Massachusetts’ interests but also those of the Saybrook peers, whose royal patent rested on the goodwill they could muster at court (although after his election as governor, Vane declared that he would ‘no way interest myself in the matters of Connecticut [i.e. the Saybrook project] any further than as a public person of this body [the Massachusetts General Court]’). To what extent Vane’s disregard for the colonists’ scruples over the royal ensign represented an early example of his unwillingness to attach importance to outward ‘forms’ is not clear.126Winthrop Pprs. (Mass. Hist. Soc.), iii. 282; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 86-8.

In the summer of 1636, with the threat of Indian attack looming, Vane made a tour of Massachusetts’ defences and found ‘the present face of things very tumultuous’.127CSP Col. 1574-1660, p. 239; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 88-9. French encroachment and Indian aggression were major problems. But as he wrote to his father in July (excerpts of which letter were apparently seen by Laud), the real threat to the colony’s future was that its royal charter would be recalled,

in which regard, much unsettlement is like to grow amongst ourselves and great discouragement to the whole plantation. For those that are truly sincere and are come out to advance the kingdom of the Lord Jesus must either suffer in the cause or else labour for such retreat as God shall direct them to. In either of which cases I do not doubt but within two years this plantation, which is now flourishing, would become desolate ... For it is not trade that God will set up in these parts but the profession of His truth, and therefore if God’s ends be not followed, men’s ends will never be blessed nor attained.128CO1/9, f. 46; J. Willcock, Life of Sir Henry Vane the Younger (1913), 40-1.

Through the combined use of diplomacy and military force, Vane succeeded in temporarily stabilising Massachusetts’s relations with the region’s Indians, although in so doing he inadvertently helped the colonists to destroy the Pequot tribe in 1637.129J. Callender, Hist. Discourse on the Colony of Rhode-Island ed. R. Elton (Collns. of the Rhode Is. Hist. Soc. iv), 85; Winthrop Pprs. (Mass. Hist. Soc.), iii. 284-5; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 89-90.

The tact and discretion that the young Vane demonstrated during his first six months as governor abandoned him in the autumn of 1636, when he threw himself into the ‘antinomian controversy’ that broke out among the colonists.130Winship, Making Heretics, 139. The extent to which Vane’s presence and patronage precipitated the crisis is a matter of dispute.131Winship, Making Heretics, 6-7, 50-2, 55, 227; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 93-4, 107, 115-16, 118, 120. However, he certainly supported the right to dissent of those colonists who leaned towards what would later be termed the antinomian position: ‘that grace was infused by God into the soul by an immediate and arbitrary act and ... that one could assign no confidence of one’s salvation to the evidence of sanctification – of a moral life lived in outward conformity to virtuous behaviour’.132Winship, Making Heretics, 88; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 105, 115. The radical, anti-formalist implications of this doctrine were spelled out by Vane’s leading opponent in the controversy, John Winthrop senior. ‘The governor ... held with Mr Cotton and many others the indwelling of the person of the Holy Ghost in a believer, and [he] went so far beyond the rest as to maintain a personal union with the Holy Ghost’. Vane was put under such intense pressure by Winthrop that in December he tried to resign as governor, pleading initially that his estate faced ‘utter ruin’ unless he returned home, but then admitting that he had a more pressing motive, which was ‘the inevitable danger he saw of God’s judgments to come upon us for these differences and dissensions ... and the scandalous imputations brought upon himself, as if he should be the cause of all’. However, the greater part of the General Court and colony refused to accept his resignation on these terms, and he was forced to serve out his full year in office. According to Winthrop, Vane continued to defend himself and Cotton and to attack their detractors (who included Hugh Peters) – all which partisan wrangling cannot have done his now tarnished reputation among the leading colonists any good. Sure enough, in the May 1637 election for governor he was defeated by Winthrop, and he and his ‘faction’ were denied any place in the new administration.133Jnl. of John Winthrop ed. Dunn, Savage, Yeandle, 200, 201-3, 211, 214-15; Winship, Making Heretics, 96-8, 103, 127, 129, 133-5, 145; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 118-21, 126-7.

Winthrop used his victory over Vane in May 1637 to have a law passed that limited future membership of the colony to those approved of by the General Court. Vane responded to this ‘wicked and sinful’ order and to Winthrop’s tract justifying it with his first political treatise, A Brief Answer to a Certain Declaration. Here, Vane argued that Winthrop and his fellow magistrates had exceeded their authority under royal charter by making their own ‘vast and illimited consent’ the rule for whether or not to allow the king’s law-abiding subjects to enter the colony. By acting in this arbitrary manner the General Court was relegating those English settlers of whom it disapproved to the status of Indians or foreigners. This argument was consistent with Vane’s standing as the son of a Caroline privy councillor and as a representative of the interests of the Saybrook patentees (Saybrook was at that time part of Massachusetts). He went further, however, and accused Winthrop and his colleagues of usurping the authority of Christ by seeking to impose their own narrow, yet undefined, version of godly orthodoxy.134Hutchinson Pprs. (Publications of the Prince Soc. 1865), i. 84-96; Winship, Making Heretics, 143; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 127-30. Yet, as has been noted, Vane was not pleading here for toleration but for limitations on coercive authority in accordance with what he perceived as the obligation of a Christian community ‘to allow each person the conditions in which his or her soul might be nourished and experience the Holy Spirit’. His seeming latitudinarianism reflected his conviction that people received the Holy Spirit at different rates ‘and were entitled to discover with their own consciences God’s plan for good government and to allow God to reveal Himself to them’.135McDermott, ‘Vane’, 131, 133, 166-7.

Vane learned several valuable lessons from his time in New England. Never again would he trust to purely ecclesiastical forms, no matter how outwardly godly (like the church of Boston), to protect the few true recipients of God’s grace. ‘Church-forms’ became, for Vane, ‘nurseries of all hypocrisy, apostasy and other spiritual uncleanesses and defilements’.136Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations, or the Mysterie and Power of Godlines (1655), 136 (E.485.1). In addition, the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of Winthrop and his faction taught him ‘the danger of frankness and the practical necessity of proceeding via alliances with the less enlightened’ while concealing his own ultimate objectives. The result would be a cool, calculating and pragmatic approach to politics that impressed his admirers.137[Sikes], Sir Henry Vane, 8-9; Rowe, Vane, 278; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’. To his enemies, on the other hand, it rendered him impossible to read, ‘of a temper not be moved and of rare dissimulation’.138Clarendon, Hist. i. 247, 249; iii. 217; Baxter, Reliquiae, 75.

Vane did not leave Massachusetts immediately on losing his place as governor. There is evidence that he, Cotton and their friend the separatist minister Roger Williams tried to buy land from the Indians in order to set up ‘an alternative millenarian city on a hill’ – and that it was only with the failure of this venture that Vane left Boston for England, early in August 1637. His followers in New England entertained hopes until at least 1640 that he would honour what seems to have been a promise to return quickly, bearing the authority of ‘governor-general’.139R. Baillie, A Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time (1646), 63 (E.317.5); Extracts from the Itineraries of Ezra Stiles ed. F.B. Dexter (New Haven, CT, 1916), 370; Jnl. of John Winthrop ed. Dunn, Savage, Yeandle, 228-9, 251; Winthrop Pprs. (Mass. Hist. Soc.), iv. 2, 25-6; Lttrs. of Roger Williams ed. J. R. Bartlett (Providence, 1874), p. 92; Winship, Making Heretics, 144, 166, 180, 212, 243.

It was perhaps the fear that Vane would try to undermine the Bay Colony – either by erecting a rival in New England itself or by stirring up opposition at court – as much as his partisanship as governor that accounts for the bitterness with which his opponents denounced him after his return to England.140Hutchinson Pprs. i. 96-113; [J. Winthrop, T. Weld], A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Antinomians (1644, E.33.16); Winship, Making Heretics, 145-8, 236. By mid-1638, however, Vane’s thoughts were apparently turned more towards Holland than New England. In July 1638, Viscount Saye wrote to John Cotton in Massachusetts that Vane was insisting ‘that himself with others here [in England] with him (who have been very active to disperse and spread abroad their opinions) hold nothing but what you approve of and [that you] are of the same judgement with them, and this hath taken with many to your prejudice’. Saye claimed that he had first perceived Vane’s ‘delusions’ in his correspondence with Vane in New England. Since Vane’s return, Saye went on

I have not been wanting to do my endeavour to show him the danger of his way and what hath been the sad issue thereof in others ... but I have not that frequent converse with him now as heretofore, nor [with] the rest of his friends, whereof there are most in Holland and the rest will shortly be there also; Mr [Thomas] Goodwin being there and Mr [Philip] Nye now upon going.141The Corresp. of John Cotton ed. S. Bush (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), 283.

Prominent among Vane’s ‘friends’ in Holland would have been the Yorkshire puritans and future parliamentarians Sir William Constable and Sir Matthew Boynton, who, by 1640, were leading members of the gathered church established at Arnhem by the Independent ministers Goodwin and Nye.142Bodl. Tanner 65, f. 24; M. Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints (Cambridge, 1977), 44-5. Saye’s letter gives the lie to Hyde’s claim that ‘no sooner’ had Vane returned from New England ‘than he seemed to be much reformed in those extravagencies’.143Clarendon, Hist. i. 248-9.

Given Vane’s apparent eagerness to join his puritan friends in Holland, his appointment to the office of (joint) treasurer of the navy, in January 1639, has the look not of a reward for any new-found discretion on his part but rather of a desperate attempt by his father – who was instrumental in gaining the king’s assent to Vane II’s appointment – to keep his son in England and safely pre-occupied in royal service.144Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’; CSP Dom. 1638-9, pp. 125, 307. If this was indeed the thinking behind Vane II’s preferment it seems to have worked, for he was evidently diligent in his new office (which came with a salary of £800 a year), showing ‘the energy and efficiency which were to mark all his career’.145SP16/452/92, f. 242; CSP Dom. 1638-9, pp. 485, 535, 550, 568, 569, 602, 627; 1639, p. 383; 1640, pp. 137, 305; Rowe, Vane, 8; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 145. Like his father, Vane apparently had no qualms about collaborating in the administration of Ship Money so long as the proceeds were used to maintain what he termed England’s ‘regality of the seas’. ‘Our strength’, he would declare in 1641, ‘has been in being able to govern the seas’.146Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’; Procs. LP ii. 788.

Early parliamentary career, 1640-1

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Vane was returned for the Yorkshire port-town of Hull. A carpet-bagger, he owed his election to the interest of his father, who had earned the townsmen’s gratitude by securing a royal order for the dismissal of a vexatious suit brought by three courtiers over title to lands assigned to the corporation for maintenance of Hull’s castle and blockhouses.147Supra, ‘Kingston-upon-Hull’. Vane II received no committee appointments in this, his first, Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate. Six weeks or so after the dissolution of the Short Parliament, he was knighted – almost certainly as a favour to his father rather than in recognition of his own services to the crown.

In July 1640, Vane II married the 16 year old daughter of the godly Lincolnshire knight Sir Christopher Wray*. Although the Wrays were one of the wealthiest gentry families in Lincolnshire, this was probably not the kind of match that the socially ambitious Vane I had envisaged for his eldest son. Not only did Vane I aspire to hoist himself and his family onto the lower rungs (at first, anyway) of the peerage, he was also far from enamoured of the puritan sympathies espoused by Wray and his circle. Perhaps Vane II had pressed hard for the marriage himself; or perhaps his reputation for ‘extravagencies’ was such that even his father’s recent promotion as secretary of state was insufficient to secure a more prestigious alliance.148Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’; infra, ‘Sir Christopher Wray’; CSP Dom. 1640, p. 137. Perhaps it was simply that Wray was able to put up the substantial sum of £5,500 by way of a marriage portion for the bride and to settle on her lands worth £600 a year. For his part, Vane I settled most of his landed estate on Vane II, together with a third part of the sub-poena office in chancery.149SP16/452/92, ff. 241-2; PROB11/245, f. 421; Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, ii. 101; Rowe, Vane, 10.

Beyond his work as a navy treasurer, Vane apparently contributed nothing to the king’s campaigns against the Scottish Covenanters in 1639 and 1640. There is no evidence that he was party to the treasonous dealings between the ‘commonwealth’ grandees (Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, Saye and Sele and their circle) and the Scots during 1640. In September, however, he received at least one social call from John Pym, during which the two men condoled together concerning ‘the sad condition of the kingdom by reason of the many illegal taxes and pressures’. Mindful (or so he later claimed) of ‘what counsels were like to be followed to the ruin of the kingdom’, he supplied John Pym with incriminating material against the earl of Strafford – the Scots’ and their English allies’ most feared enemy at court – that he had found by accident among Vane I’s papers.150Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’; Clarendon, Hist. i. 301-2. Vane II would later insist that he had not sought a place in the Long Parliament. But reluctant or not, he was returned for Hull again on 26 October.151C219/43/3/100; Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 89.

Vane II does not appear to have joined the front rank of parliamentary grandees until 1643. Hyde, who would leave Westminster in the spring of 1642, referred to Pym, John Hampden, Oliver St John and Denzil Holles as the ‘governing voices’ in the Commons during the early years of the Long Parliament, and of this group, Pym, Hampden, St John and their closest allies in the Lords ‘were of the most intimate and entire trust with each other and made the engine which moved all the rest’. Nevertheless, ‘it was visible’, claimed Hyde, that Nathaniel Fiennes I (Saye’s second son) and Vane II ‘were received by them with full confidence and without reserve’.152Clarendon, Hist. i. 247, 263. That Vane stood outside of the innermost circle of parliamentary leaders is perhaps not surprising given that he had not hazarded all with them in plotting to bring down the personal rule of Charles I. Nor can he have found it easy to identify too openly with the government’s leading critics while his father was still in favour at court. Fundamentally, perhaps, Vane II lacked a trusted friend or patron among the leading ‘junto’ peers – the earls of Bedford, Warwick and Essex, Viscount Saye and Lord Mandeville. According to Thomas Juxon*, probably writing in the mid to late 1640s, Vane and Pym ‘did never well agree, nor does he [Vane] with Nathaniel Fiennes’.153Juxon Jnl. 94. Later claims that Vane had been close to Lord Brooke in the early 1640s may well have substance; but Brooke himself was essentially a member of the supporting cast, like Vane.154Baxter, Reliquiae, 75; Clarendon, Hist. i. 263; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 138-9.

Richard Baxter’s recollection that Vane II was ‘very active at first for the bringing of delinquents to punishment. He was the principal man that drove on the Parliament to go too high and act too vehemently against the king’, is not borne out by the Journal or the parliamentary diaries for 1640-2.155Baxter, Reliquiae, 75. In fact, Vane’s career in the Long Parliament began slowly. Between the start of the opening session early in November 1640 and the execution of Strafford on 12 May 1641 he was named to a mere 18 committees, served as messenger to the Lords twice and was appointed either as a reporter or manager of four conferences.156CJ ii. 93b, 110b, 111b, 116b, 140b; LJ iv. 241a. Whatever doubts were entertained at Westminster about his Calvinist orthodoxy or his commitment to tarrying for the magistrate in matters of church discipline, he received a number of appointments in these opening months for suppressing popery, promoting a preaching ministry and for punishing Laudian clerics.157CJ ii. 24a, 54b, 105b, 111b, 129a. His addition on 9 February 1641 to the committee for the state of the kingdom (or the ‘committee of twenty-four’) – to which was referred the vexed question of episcopal reform – was apparently intended to boost the reformist contingent among its members. The Scottish Covenanting minister Robert Baillie certainly saw Vane at this time as a firm friend to the Scots and the cause of root-and-branch reform.158CJ ii. 81a; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. i. 302; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 184. On 26 February, Vane was appointed a messenger to the Lords to request a conference concerning the charges of treason that the Commons were preparing against Archbishop Laud.159CJ ii. 93b.

Yet if Vane’s appointments and contributions to debate before mid-1641 suggest anything, it is that his priority at Westminster was not further reformation in religion or punishing the architects of the personal rule but finding money and men to maintain the navy and paying off and disbanding the English and Scottish armies in northern England. He was named to a series of committees and to four conference-management teams for paying and regulating the armies in the north, raising money for the navy and for ‘pressing and governing of mariners’.160CJ ii. 67a, 83a, 92a, 94b, 107a, 110b, 116b, 139b, 140b; LJ iv. 241a; Procs. LP ii. 586, 591; iii. 275, 282, 551. His maiden speech in the Long Parliament was apparently made on 22 December 1640, when he urged that money be sent speedily to the English army. No notice was taken of his words either by the House or the parliamentary diarists – except one. The next day (23 Dec.), he seconded Sir Robert Pye’s call for an increase in spending on the navy. Unless £60,000 was ‘presently supplied’, Vane warned the House, ‘our [wooden] walls will be much broken’. On 28 December, he repeated his demand ‘that speedy course be taken for the navy’, and later that same day he responded to what was probably a cue from his father – an experienced naval administrator and the crown’s chief spokesman in the Commons, particularly on financial matters – by delivering a detailed assessment of the shortfall in vital expenditure on the navy. None of these speeches excited much interest or comment.161Northcote Note Bk. 103, 106, 113, 114-15. He returned to this theme several times between January and April 1641, joining with his father and a handful of other MPs in a largely futile bid to impress upon the House the dire implications of underfunding the navy.

Vane’s interest in naval administration – like that of his father – probably grew out of a concern to maintain and, ideally, extend England’s pretensions as a Protestant power. His speeches reveal not only a sure grasp of naval finances but also a willingness to play the part both of an obedient son and ‘a man well satisfied and composed to the government’.162Procs. LP ii. 230, 398, 410, 598, 780, 784, 786-7, 788, 795, 798, 800, 833, 836; iii. 479, 584; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 22, 23, 79; Clarendon, Hist. i. 249. Until April 1641, he seems to have refrained from uttering anything in debate that might compromise his father’s position at court or that could be construed as a personal criticism of royal policies past or present.

Vane II’s breach with the court was occasioned by Parliament’s prosecution of his father’s great enemy the earl of Strafford. Before mid-April 1641, his involvement as an MP in the Houses’ proceedings against Strafford may have consisted of nothing more than nomination to a committee set up on 20 March to prepare heads for a conference with the Lords concerning the earl’s trial.163CJ ii. 109a. But after the trial broke up in confusion on 10 April, Vane (at the instigation of the prosecution) recounted to the House his disclosure to Pym the previous September of Vane I’s notes of a privy council sub-committee on Scottish affairs on 5 May 1640, which supported his testimony in Strafford’s trial, that the earl had urged the use of military force to overcome opposition in England to the king’s war against the Covenanters. Pym corroborated Vane’s story, and Vane I’s paper was read to the House.164Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’; CJ ii. 118a; Procs. LP iii. 493-5, 497-501, 511-12; Clarendon, Hist. i. 301-5. According to Hyde, Vane II declared that

he knew this discovery would prove little less than ruin in the good opinion of his father, but having been provoked by the tenderness of his conscience towards his common parent, his country, to trespass against his natural father, he hoped he should find compassion from that House, though he had little hope of pardon elsewhere.165Clarendon, Hist. i. 304.

Sure enough, Vane I accused his son of betrayal and ‘infidelity’ and declared that ‘he shall be [a] greater stranger upon this occasion than ever’. At this, a motion was made for reconciling the two men, ‘divers much commending his [Vane II’s] ... care of the public good which outswayed private respects’.166Procs. LP iii. 498, 500; Clarendon, Hist. i. 305. Hyde would later claim that ‘this scene so well acted, with such passion and gestures’, was an elaborate charade designed to clear Vane I of ‘malice and perjury’ and to send a warning to Lord Cottington (Sir Francis Cottington†) that unless he relinquished his office of master of the court of wards to Saye, he, too, might find himself facing treason charges as a result of the disclosures in Vane I’s notes.167Clarendon, Hist. i. 305-6. A more plausible reading of this episode is that Pym and the Bedfordian wing of the junto (Bedford, Saye, Pym and their confidants), far from wishing to precipitate Strafford’s attainder and execution, were in fact trying to introduce new, more substantial evidence in order to resurrect the trial and, with it, the prospect of trading the earl’s life for concessions from the king.168Procs. LP iii. 512; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 241-2, 245-7. Hyde was probably nearer the mark in claiming that the events of 10 April ‘grafted’ Vane II in the ‘entire confidence’ of the junto, ‘so that nothing was concealed from him’.169Clarendon, Hist. i. 249.

The Commons and the parliamentary leadership began to hand Vane more responsibility from mid-1641. In June, he received only four appointments, in July six and in August 21. In all, between early June and the September 1641 recess, he was named to 24 committees, seven conference-management teams and served as a messenger to the Lords on nine occasions.170CJ ii. 208a, 217b, 240b, 258a, 266a, 273a, 275b, 276a, 282a, 282b, 283a, 286b; LJ iv. 311a, 320b, 346a, 372a, 377b, 382b, 383a, 391a, 391b. Vane was finding his feet in the Long Parliament, moving out of his father’s political shadow. That summer, he joined that core group of MPs which liaised with the Lords on major pieces of parliamentary business – the Ten Propositions, disbanding the armies in the north, sending commissioners to Scotland, the king’s controversial decisions to allow the Spanish and French to recruit soldiers in Ireland, and the conclusion in August of the Anglo-Scottish treaty ‘that knit the two kingdoms in love and peace for the future’ (which Vane, like the junto, saw as a reason for national celebration).171CJ ii. 190b, 208a, 217b, 238b, 240b, 257a, 258a, 258b, 263b, 264b, 266a, 273a, 273b, 275b, 276a, 282a, 282b; Procs. LP vi. 566, 570-1; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 349-50, 352-4. He was clearly valued for the gentlemanly polish and prestige (as the son of a minister of state) that he doubtless brought to his appointments as a messenger to the Lords and, on 8 September, as an emissary to the French ambassador.172CJ ii. 282b, 284a. His naval expertise also made him the ideal man to second Sir John Culpeper’s mission to the treasury commissioners to secure a monthly subsistence for the ‘20 ships set forth by order of this House’.173CJ ii. 273b. But the Commons was apparently not yet ready to refer the drafting of legislation, or even day-to-day orders, solely to his care. His services as a draftsman were specifically required only, it seems, when the parliamentary leadership was eager to play up its support for further reformation in religion.

Vane established his credentials as a ‘fiery spirit’ at Westminster largely as a champion of root-and-branch church reform. Here, too, he broke politically with his father, who although moving away from the court himself as a result of Strafford’s trial and execution was distinctly unenthusiastic about reforming the liturgy and episcopal church government.174Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’. The draft bill that Sir Edward Dering presented to the Commons on 27 May 1641 for the ‘utter abolishing’ of episcopacy was apparently the work of the ‘rooters’ Vane II and Oliver Cromwell, in consultation with Lord Brooke’s son-in-law Sir Arthur Hesilrige and doubtless other leading junto-men as well.175CJ ii. 159a; E. Dering, A Collection of Speeches (1642), 62-3 (E.197.1); Adamson, Noble Revolt, 328-9. At a meeting of the committee of the whole House to consider this bill, on 12 June, Vane defended Hesilrige’s assertion that only papists and the popishly affected were not sensible of the ‘miseries and wrongs committed by the bishops’. He then delivered a speech of his own, which he afterwards had published, in which he equated episcopal church government with ‘popish hierarchy’ and insisted that ‘the whole fabric of this building is so rotten and corrupt, from the very foundation of it to the top, that if we pull it not down now it will fall about the ears of all those that endeavour it within a very few years’. Church government in general, he argued, was necessary and desirable. But episcopacy had been ‘the back-door and inlet of all superstition and corruption into the worship and doctrine of this church and the means of hastening us back again to Rome’, while in recent years it had exercised ‘so powerful and ill an influence upon our laws, the prerogative of the king and liberties of the subject that it is like a spreading leprosy, which leaves nothing untainted’.176Vane, S[i]r Henry Vane his speech in the House of Commons (1641, E.198.20); Procs. LP v. 113, 115, 116; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 163-71. Lord Brooke advanced similar arguments, though at considerably greater length, in his 1641 tract on the nature of episcopacy.177Brooke, A Discourse Opening the Nature of that Episcopacie…Exercised in England (1641, E.177.22). On 21 June, Vane proposed adding a clause to the episcopacy bill for appointing a body of six lay elders and six ministers in every diocese to exercise the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the bishops – which proposals (or something very like them) the committee duly added to the bill on 12 July.178Procs. LP v. 254, 256, 257-8, 260, 603.

To what extent Vane’s contributions to the committee of the whole House on the bill for abolishing episcopacy formed part of the junto’s policy of trying to re-assure the Covenanters of its commitment to godly reformation is not clear. He was hardly so naive as to suppose that the objections of the majority at Westminster to abolishing episcopacy could be easily argued away – and certainly nothing ever came of the draft bill. The timing of his call on 8 August for the impeachment of the bishops – amidst attempts at Westminster to enlist Scottish support for delaying the king’s departure to Scotland – certainly looks suspicious, as does the fact that he was immediately seconded by his fellow Member for Hull, Peregrine Pelham.179Procs. LP v. 293, 298; Rowe, Vane, 193.

That Vane was working closely with the parliamentary leadership by this point is evident from his nomination to a committee set up on 3 August 1641 to prepare a remonstrance concerning the state of the kingdom and the church – a document that would emerge in November as the Grand Remonstrance.180CJ ii. 234a, 253a; Rowe, Vane, 194. Every member of this committee with the exception of Sir John Culpeper – that is, Pym, Vane, Hampden, Fiennes, William Strode I and Sir Walter Erle – was part of, or close to, the junto. On 12 August, the Commons ordered Pym, Hampden, Strode and Culpeper to concentrate on the secular grievances to be highlighted in this remonstrance, leaving Vane and Fiennes (another campaigner against episcopacy) to deal with the state of the church.181CJ ii. 253a. Vane has been credited as the main author of this section of the Grand Remonstrance (clauses 181-204) dealing with religion, and one source has even claimed (implausibly) that the entire Remonstrance was ‘largely the work’ of Vane and Fiennes.182J. Donoghue, Fire under the Ashes (Chicago, 2013), 95; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 175-6. However, there is no way of determining the true extent of Vane’s contribution to drafting clauses 181-204. If he was their main author then he showed remarkably little interest in defending his handiwork when the Remonstrance was debated in the Commons that November.

Vane was certainly handling some of the House’s most sensitive business by the autumn of 1641, particularly on issues concerning public worship. When the godly interest complained on 8 September about the lack of progress on religious reform, the House appointed him as a messenger to the Lords to desire a conference ‘touching the prevention of superstitious innovations in the church’. The Lords agreed to this request, whereupon Vane was appointed one of the conference reporters.183CJ ii. 283a; LJ iv. 391b; Procs. LP vi. 686; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 355-6. The next day (9 Sept.), he was named with Pym, Culpeper, St John, Lord Falkland and Sir Thomas Barrington to a committee for drawing up a declaration that endorsed the Commons’ measures against Laudian innovations while implicitly criticising the Lords for having ‘now ordered the severe execution of those laws touching the Common Prayer Book at this time when we all expected and hoped for reformation’.184CJ ii. 287a; Procs. LP vi. 716. That same day (9 Sept.), Vane was named to the Recess Committee* that would manage Parliament’s affairs until the Houses re-convened in October.185CJ ii. 288b. Like his father, he was included on a royalist list of the king’s leading opponents at Westminster by the autumn of 1641, together with the earls of Essex and Warwick, Pym, Hampden, Holles, St John and other members or allies of the junto.186HMC Salisbury, xxiv. 277.

Despite Vane’s later reputation as one of the Long Parliament’s ‘chief opposers of the court party’, in fact his contribution at Westminster in the year preceding the outbreak of civil war – although considerable – did not rival those of Pym, Holles and other leading junto-men.187Rowe, Vane, 277; PJ i. p. xxii; PJ iii. p. xix. Between the re-convening of Parliament on 20 October 1641 and August 1642 he was named to a maximum of 102 committees and as reporter or manager of perhaps as many as 30 conferences, although the true figure was almost certainly less than that – and possibly as few as 14.188CJ ii. 306b, 310b, 321a, 326a, 348a, 353a, 358a, 361a, 363b, 368a, 377b, 382b, 432a, 480b, 504b, 506a, 508b, 529b, 548b, 550a, 561b, 568a, 573a, 609a, 614a, 616a, 634a, 665b; D’Ewes (C), 154. He also served as a messenger to the Lords on 18 occasions.189CJ ii. 296b, 312a, 321b, 343a, 371b, 386a, 478b, 493b, 505b, 509a, 545b, 603a, 609b, 626a, 642b, 675b; LJ iv. 407a, 435a, 448b, 474b, 506a, 510, 521a, 645b, 665b, 682a, 685a, 695b; v. 25a, 102b, 109a, 137a, 166b, 214a. The uncertainty surrounding his tally of appointments is partly a consequence of his father’s dismissal from court office in December 1641. Until that point, Vane I had generally been referred to as ‘Mr Treasurer’ or ‘Mr Secretary’, thereby distinguishing him from Vane II. Thereafter, however, the clerk of the Commons and the parliamentary diarists often fail to specify exactly who they meant by ‘Sir Henry Vane’.

Vane II’s appointments and speeches can be identified in sufficient number, however, to confirm his support for the junto’s programme from the autumn of 1641 of wresting control of the levers of power from the king. Late in October, he was selected as a committeeman and as a messenger to the Lords to make preparations for a conference concerning ‘the sequestering the bishops from their votes in Parliament’.190CJ ii. 295b, 296b; LJ iv. 407a; D’Ewes (C), 40. When news of the Irish rebellion reached London, he received a series of appointments for raising troops and money for the war effort in Ireland, suppressing the rebels’ leading co-religionists in England (a policy he vigorously supported) and – more controversially – giving Parliament power to order the kingdom’s military forces and allocate senior commands. It was Vane who was sent to inform the Lords on 11 November that the Commons ‘does incline to accept of the offer of the Scots for sending of ten thousand men into Ireland’.191CJ ii. 302a, 303b, 305b, 306b, 309a, 310b, 312a, 317a, 321a, 321b, 343a, 353a, 357a, 357b, 449b, 453b, 477a, 504b; LJ iv. 435a, 448b, 474b, 644; v. 15b; D’Ewes (C), 120, 153-4, 177; PJ i. 371; iii. 363, 438; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 422-3, 428. The rebellion doubtless served as a reminder, supposing he needed any, of just how vital it was to maintain friendly relations with the Covenanters, and he would figure prominently in the junto’s efforts during 1642 to advertise its commitment to closer union between the two kingdoms.192CJ ii. 353a, 386a, 400a, 407a, 449b, 513b, 576a, 603a, 707a, 737a, 738a, 813a, 832a.

Events in Ireland would have strengthened Vane’s concern to maintain the navy’s capability to guard the Channel and, now, to send troops and supplies to Ireland.193CJ ii. 320a, 321a, 335b; D’Ewes (C), 154, 165, 183, 224. But then in mid-December 1641 – about a week after Vane I had been dismissed as secretary of state – he was removed from his office as a treasurer of the navy. Evidently his collaboration with the junto had not gone unnoticed at court. The Commons took his dismissal badly. Indeed, Pym and other MPs toyed for quite some time with the idea of inserting a clause for re-instating Vane in the next tonnage and poundage bill. Resentment at Vane’s dismissal was attributed to the fact that he – unlike his father – was ‘much esteemed in the Commons’. Perhaps a more likely explanation is that Vane II’s treasurership had given the parliamentary leadership potential access to a major source of funding at an important stage in its efforts to seize the military initiative from the king.194CJ ii. 349a, 360b, 485a; D’Ewes (C), 312, 314; PJ ii. 55; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 210, 211.

Vane and the outbreak of civil war, 1642

Following the attempted arrest of the Five Members early in January 1642, Vane played a leading role in the Commons’ efforts to vindicate its privileges and to secure itself against the king and his more belligerent supporters. On 6 January, he was named to a five-man committee for drawing up a declaration that it was ‘a breach of the privilege of Parliament and of the liberty of the subject for any person to arrest any of the said Members by colour of such warrants [issued under the king’s hand]’. In order to highlight the Commons’ commitment to due legal process and thereby throw the king’s arbitrary proceedings into even sharper relief, Vane moved ‘that we might make some short declaration that we did not intend to protect these five gentlemen or any other Member of our House in any crime but should be most ready to bring them to condign punishment if they should be proceeded against in a legal way’.195CJ ii. 368a, 368b, 371b, 376b, 377b, 379b, 382b, 383b, 384a, 386a, 392a, 407b, 432a, 433a; LJ iv. 506a, 521a; PJ i. 21, 79, 83.

Vane was a regular among that group of MPs to which the House turned for ammunition in its ‘paper skirmishes’ with the king during the early months of 1642.196CJ ii. 388a, 398b, 432b, 439b, 469b, 478a, 484b, 504b, 506a, 508b, 583b, 609b, 614a, 616a, 629b, 637a; PJ ii. 74; iii. 147. But he was recruited not only for this war of words but also to help secure the passage through Parliament of what would become, in March, the Militia Ordinance.197CJ ii. 440a, 461a, 462a, 478a, 478b, 479a; LJ iv. 645b; PJ i. 411; ii. 116. On 1 March, he was named to a committee of both Houses to attend the king with Parliament’s reply to his refusal to accede to anything that would divest him of his ‘just power’ over the kingdom’s militia. This parliamentary delegation met the king at Theobalds, where Vane was reportedly instrumental in persuading his fellow delegates to reject a proposal for giving Charles more time to state his case.198CJ ii. 462a; Dudley, Lord North, A Narrative of Some Passages in or Relating to the Long Parliament (1670), 22-3; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 184. On 24 March, Vane was named to a committee for preparing a petition to the king, requesting that the junto grandee the earl of Warwick be appointed commander of the summer’s fleet – a notion to which Charles, as Vane had already informed the House, was strongly averse.199CJ ii. 478b, 495b, 509a; LJ iv. 645b, 695b; PJ ii. 39, 43, 122-3.

Vane was as suspicious of the king’s sympathisers by the spring of 1642 as he was of the king himself, securing nomination in first place to a committee set up on 25 March for listing and punishing those MPs (mostly proto-royalists) who had absented themselves from the House without leave.200CJ ii. 496b. Added, on Cromwell’s motion, to the committee of both Houses for investigating the Kentish petition of March in support of episcopacy and denouncing the Militia Ordinance, Vane moved on 21 April to enlarge the committee’s power ‘that they might inquire touching all petitions of the like nature in any county’. To Vane, Pym and other opponents of accommodation, such petitions were at best a ‘dangerous inconvenience’.201CJ ii. 506b; PJ ii. 113, 130, 198-9, 237; T.P.S. Woods, Prelude to Civil War 1642 (Salisbury, 1980), 64, 141-3. In July, Vane headed a Commons’ delegation to Kent, his home county, to pressure the Kentish gentry into repudiating the commission of array and their ‘late dangerous petition’.202CJ ii. 686b, 700b; PJ iii. 250, 277-8; Woods, Prelude to Civil War, 102-3, 105, 107-8.

Yet although Vane was undoubtedly one of the king’s staunchest opponents at Westminster by mid-1642, the assertion that he and Fiennes were primarily responsible for the Nineteen Propositions – which originated in a committee of the Lords – is completely without foundation. Vane was peripherally involved, at most, in drafting the propositions and steering them through the House.203Donoghue, Fire under the Ashes, 102, 103. As a member of one, possibly two, committees to frame a response to the royalist rebuttal to the Nineteen Propositions, His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions, he may have had a hand in drafting what seems to have been the Commons’ approved rejoinder, A Political Catechism, which was published in May 1643.204CJ ii. 637a, 643a; A Political Catechism (1643, E.104.8). But the fact that Vane borrowed from this work in his trial in 1662 does not support claims that he had authored it in collaboration with Parliament’s leading civil-war polemicist Henry Parker.205C.M. Weston, J.R. Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns (Cambridge, 1981), 155; Donoghue, Fire under the Ashes, 102-3, 318. In fact, Parker had no hand in penning the Catechism and no great intimacy with Vane during the early 1640s.206M. Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1995), 74, 166, 195.

Vane contributed significantly to the junto’s military preparations in England and Ireland in the months preceding the outbreak of civil war. In the Commons, he was named to several important committees early in 1642 for ‘setting forth ships’, and he was the main point of contact between the House and the lord admiral – his father’s friend, Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland.207Supra, ‘Committee of Navy and Customs’; CJ ii. 378b, 381b, 414b, 428a, 456b, 457b, 460b, 474b, 478b, 493a, 495a, 497a, 501b, 522b, 539b, 543b, 594a, 613a, 613b, 614a; PJ i. 188; ii. 4, 36, 78, 154, 210; iii. 50. Vane was also an active member of the bicameral commission for Irish affairs established in April, which functioned as a prototype ‘war cabinet’ during the spring and summer of 1642.208PJ iii. pp. xxiii, 363, 438; SP28/1C, ff. 67, 74, 145, 147, 149, 156; SP28/1D, ff. 394, 444, 449. As one of 24 MPs named late in May to a standing committee of both Houses for the defence of the kingdom, he was a member of the immediate forerunner of Parliament’s main executive body during the first 18 months of the war, the Committee of Safety*.209CJ ii. 589a. Godly reform was pushed into the background at Westminster amid these warlike preparations. Vane was named to only two committees during the first half of 1642 that concerned the settling of religion, although in February he presented a petition (from the parishioners of St Martin-in-the-Fields) and made a motion in favour of the godly ministers Thomas Case and William Edwards.210CJ ii. 438a, 448b; PJ i. 383, 410.

Vane’s position among the leading men in the Commons was consolidated with his appointment in August, September and October 1642 to several executive agencies for managing Parliament’s war effort. Early in August, the Houses passed an ordinance restoring him as treasurer of the navy, but now he would be in sole possession of the office – which was reportedly worth between £3,000 and £4,000 a year and came with a house at Deptford.211CJ ii. 705a, 706a, 708b, 709b; LJ v. 272b-273a; PJ iii. 288; Ludlow, Voyce, 314; Rowe, Vane, 129, 130. Vane’s re-instatement was part of a broader initiative by Parliament to tighten its grip on naval administration and was closely linked to the formation that month of the Committee of Navy and Customs* (CNC) – of which Vane was himself a member.212Supra, ‘Committee of Navy and Customs’. In mid-September, his name headed a list of six MPs and six naval officers appointed to a parliamentary commission for the maintenance and ‘well-government’ of the navy – the king having passed orders ‘altogether interrupting the affairs of the same, so as no provisions can be orderly received in or issued out of the stores for the use of the fleet now at sea or [of] any fleet hereafter to be employed for the defence of the kingdom’.213LJ v. 355b-356a. On 19 October, Vane was named to the first Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports* (CACP), which was tasked with ordering the fleet and other operations at sea, and he figured prominently in its proceedings.214LJ v. 407b; SP16/494, ff. 34v, 177.

As a member of these three interlocking bodies and as navy treasurer, Vane stood at the centre of Parliament’s naval administration during the war and was clearly valued by the Commons for his expertise in this area – as, indeed, was his father.215CJ ii. 962b; iii. 90a, 329a, 334b, 356a, 626b, 681a, 722a; iv. 64a, 322b; Add. 18777, f. 150v; Harl. 164, ff. 327v, 394v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 20 (14-20 May 1643), 255 (E.104.21). Vane II became entangled in 1642 in a struggle between his father and the commander of Parliament’s fleet, the earl of Warwick, for control of the kingdom’s postal service.216Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’; Hunts. RO, Acc. 2091, no. 497. But the resulting damage to Vane II’s relations with Warwick had apparently been repaired by mid-1643 at the latest, when the two men were exchanging friendly letters about naval matters and the workings of God’s ‘merciful providence ... for the deliverance of His people’.217Stowe 184, f. 121v.

Vane was not quite as important when it came to managing Parliament’s field forces, at least for the first 18 months of the war. His omission from the group of ten MPs named to the Committee of Safety in July 1642 was made good on 8 September, when he and three other Commons-men were added to this body – probably, in part, to offset the sizeable number of pro-peace peers among its members.218CJ ii. 758b; LJ v. 343a. He seems to have attended the committee regularly during the autumn as it worked hard to supply and equip Parliament’s main field army under the earl of Essex. However, the claim that he enjoyed a prominent role in its proceedings has been sustained only by completely ignoring all of his father’s reports from the committee and his signature on many of its warrants and simply assigning them to Vane II. In fact, Vane I was undoubtedly the more active member of the committee, signing almost twice as many of its warrants as Vane II and making at least four reports to Vane II’s two – and one of these may also have been made by Vane I.219Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; ‘Sir Henry Vane I’; CJ iii. 364a; Add. 31116, p. 9.

Vane and the war party, 1642-3

Vane II needed no time for reflection in the country – as his father seems to have done – before pledging himself wholeheartedly to the parliamentarian cause.220‘Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’; CJ ii. 740a; PJ iii. 322. His Commons’ appointments after returning from his brief mission to Kent late in July 1642 suggest that he was, and would remain, committed to defying the king by force of arms, regardless of peace overtures from the royalist camp or the disappointments of the Edgehill campaign. His tally of appointments between early August 1642 and his departure as a parliamentary commissioner to Scotland a year later was impressive. He was named to perhaps as many as 100 committees and was included on a maximum of 36 conference-management teams, often with Pym, Hampden and other war-party grandees – although anything up to a half of these appointments may have been his father’s.221CJ ii. 704b, 707a, 784b, 789a, 791a, 795b, 798b, 804a, 805a, 808b, 832b, 849a, 861a, 861b, 871a, 897b, 938a, 983b, 997b, 1002b; iii. 3b, 29b, 30b, 42b, 52b, 58b, 59b, 61b, 82a, 106b, 119a, 126b, 133a, 146b, 156a. His role as a messenger to the Lords – which he undertook on between ten and 12 occasions during this period – is easier to assess, for the clerk of the Lords was generally scrupulous in distinguishing between father and son.222CJ ii. 754b, 802b, 806b, 810a, 869b, 880a, 954a, 990b; iii. 19a, 31b, 44b, 109b; LJ v. 341b, 465a, 477a, 585b, 640a, 671b, 693a; vi. 69b. Only one of the four divisions in which one of the Vanes served as teller during the first year of the war can definitely be assigned to Vane II.223CJ ii. 947a; Harl. 164, f. 284. But the context of the remaining three tellerships suggests that they were Vane II’s appointments rather than his father’s.224CJ ii. 858a, 934a; iii. 33a.

From July 1642, Vane II was named to a series of committees for prosecuting the war effort, sequestering or otherwise punishing royalists (including royalist MPs) and papists and for securing Parliament’s authority in Kent.225CJ ii. 700b, 703a, 703b, 717b, 725a, 735b, 737b, 745a, 761a, 763b, 769a, 777b, 814a, 835a, 838a, 841a, 856a, 861b, 891b, 913a, 953b; iii. 23b. Similarly, his career profile during the autumn and winter of 1642 indicates his support for a hard line against the king and his complicity in the war party’s policy of wooing the Scottish Covenanters with an eye to securing their military assistance.226CJ ii. 737a, 738a, 752a, 764a, 771a, 791a, 795b, 798b, 803b, 813a, 819b, 832a, 901b, 949b; LJ v. 384b-385a; Add. 31116, p. 9. Appointed on 8 November to a bicameral committee to attend Common Hall in order to vindicate Parliament’s efforts to reach an accommodation with the king after Edgehill, he and Lord Brooke blamed the failure of this initiative on ‘that ill counsel and that desperate counsel that hemmed in his Majesty’. Given the king’s intransigence, Vane pleaded with the citizens, on the Commons’ behalf, to ‘join cordially and join resolutely with your purses, with your endeavours and all that lies in your power, to acquit yourself like men ... to defend yourselves against that violence and oppression that is now almost at your doors’.227CJ ii. 840a; Three Speeches Spoken in Guild-Hall (1642, E.126.44). Since the spring of 1641, at the latest, Vane had been among those MPs who enjoyed the trust of Isaac Penington* and other leading godly citizens, and this familiarity with London’s affairs and its ruling party was reflected in his Commons’ appointments and particularly in the regularity with which he was included on parliamentary delegations to the City during the civil war – usually to ask for loans.228CJ ii. 805a, 835a, 845b, 848b, 860a, 863b, 869b, 870a, 871a, 876b, 921b, 925a, 941a, 971a; iii. 360b, 365a, 385a, 454a, 457a, 551b; iv. 198b, 365a, 546a, 564a; v. 366a; LJ v. 465a; Proc. LP ii. 586; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 133; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 658-9; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 251-2; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 455; Pearl, London, 203, 229; Rowe, Vane, 28-31, 67; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 159-60. His appointment late in November 1642 to the Committee for Advance of Money both reflected and reinforced his closeness to the war-party grandees and their allies in the City.229Supra, ‘Committee for Advance of Money’; SP19/1, p. 21; CJ ii. 866a.

Vane was prominent in the war’s party’s struggle between late October 1642 and April 1643 to counter the growing pressure from its peace-party rivals and elements in the City to secure a swift, negotiated settlement with the king. When a motion was made in the Commons on 31 October ‘to consider of making a peace and accommodation with the king’, the Committee of Safety (or, more probably, Pym and his allies on the committee) sent Vane to inform MPs that they had been considering just that issue

but they did assure us that there was no such cause of fear as we might conceive, for that the Parliament’s army was in very good condition, in as good heart and courage as ever it was, and that therefore they desired we would not yet enter into debate of that business in the House till we had received some further advertisements from the lord general.230Add. 31116, p. 9.

In a debate on 21 November concerning a message from Charles defending his attack upon London and expressing a willingness to entertain ‘just propositions of peace’, Vane urged that Parliament should not entertain such overtures until it was in a position of strength, ‘lest we send propositions which will be returned us again with scorn’. It was probably Vane rather than his father who, at the conclusion of the debate, was a teller with Sir Henry Mildmay against giving further consideration to the king’s message. The winning tellers were the peace-party grandees Denzil Holles and William Pierrepont.231CJ ii. 858a; Add. 18777, f. 64. When the debate on the king’s message resumed the next day (22 Nov.), Vane argued that Parliament

should propound such propositions as consist of our well being. We had settled the state of the church in indifferent measure before these troubles. Now, we should not recede from our former grounds – viz. his Majesty, seduced, withdrew himself from our counsel, upon which we made our Protestation, and upon these this ground we took up arms ... for our defence.

If Parliament made any ‘demands’, he insisted, ‘they should be such as will cure our disease’ – and, in particular, that the king return to Parliament and surrender all ‘delinquents ... for if his Majesty grant what we desire, if those persons be not taken from him [then] all that we do will come to nought’. As Vane was surely aware, and as Pierrepont, in reply, was at pains to point out, the king would never agree to such terms.232Add. 18777, ff. 66v-67. A month later (22 Dec.), Vane took the lead in criticising the peace propositions that the Lords had drawn up and which would form the basis of the Oxford treaty negotiations the following spring. According to the parliamentary diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes,

divers opposed the whole work of taking any propositions of peace at all into consideration at this time. And amongst others, Sir Henry Vane the younger spake very long and very vehemently, showing that if we had intended to have allowed of such propositions of peace as these are, we should have entered into the consideration of them sooner, before so much treasure had been spent and so much blood had been spilt. That he feared we should, by entering into the consideration of these propositions, neglect our own defence and bring ourselves to utter ruin and desolation. And then, contrary to his own argument, he himself entered upon the debate of several of the propositions and spake against them.233Harl. 164, f. 271.

The only proposition that Vane was apparently willing to entertain was a demand that the king return to Parliament.234Add. 18777, f. 101. Following a report two days later (24 Dec.) that some of London’s leading citizens would not advance Parliament money unless they were allowed to meet in support of a pro-accommodation petition that had been circulating in the capital since early December, Vane complained that ‘there hath been a fire cast into this City by means of this petition, and at their meetings they menaced the lord mayor [Isaac Penington]’. If Parliament gave them permission to meet, he argued, ‘what countenance may it give unto them? And by this means we lie open our wants to the king’s army’.235Add. 18777, f. 103.

The debate over the peace process had largely moved on by February 1643 to the question of whether king and Parliament should disband their armies before a treaty or after it.236Add. 18777, ff. 145v-158. Having lost the argument as to whether to send peace propositions to the king, the more militant Members, led by the war-party grandees Pym, Hampden and Sir Philip Stapilton, were determined to stiffen Parliament’s terms to the point where they were sure Charles would reject them. To this end, they questioned the idea of a cessation of arms while the treaty was under way, urging instead that Parliament’s and the king’s forces should be disbanded before negotiations – which to D’Ewes and other MPs genuinely committed to an accommodation seemed ‘preposterous’ and ‘to propose an impossibility against the making of peace’.237Add. 18777, ff. 146v, 148, 152v, 158; Harl. 164, ff. 295, 296v, 300, 301v, 302; Harl. 1901, f. 58v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 7 (12-18 Feb. 1643), 85-7 (E.246.39); no. 8 (19-25 Feb. 1643), 95 (E.246.41); CSP Ven. 1642-3, p. 215; D. Scott, ‘Party politics in the Long Parliament’, in Revolutionary England ed. G. Southcombe, G. Tapsell (2017), 40-1. In a speech on 10 February, Vane duly lined up behind the war-party grandees, arguing that since Edgehill

we see nothing from the king that can give us any reality of his desire of peace. We have offered a disbanding, which will try his Majesty’s inclination ... the cessation must tend to the ruin of ourselves ... we have made an overture for peace which if it be not accepted we have discharged our duties towards God and man.238Add. 18777, f. 149v.

If the House voted for a treaty before the armies had disbanded, he argued the next day (11 Feb.), it would be to leave potential ‘mediators between us and the king ... if we admit of an umpire between the king and us, and the king’s council shall alter and add what they think fit, what will become of the Parliament?’239Add. 18777, f. 151. When the issue of disbandment before or after a treaty came to a head on 17 February, Vane was identified by D’Ewes with those ‘hot spirits’ Pym, Henry Marten, William Strode I and Sir Peter Wentworth who claimed that they were not against a treaty per se ‘so [long] as it might be after the armies were disbanded’. Perceiving that the war party was likely to lose this debate if it came to a vote, Sir Philip Stapilton suggested an addition to the question of whether there should be a treaty before disbanding – i.e. that the first proposition relate to the disbandment of the armies and that the treaty should not proceed until it had been agreed on. As this was a variation on the disbandment before treaty theme, it received the support of Hampden and other ‘violent spirits’ – although not that of Vane and Alexander Rigby I, who feared ‘that it would cause the whole question to pass with the less opposition’. In the event, Hampden and ‘all those fiery spirits almost who had first moved for this addition’ voted against it, but they were defeated by the peace party and its supporters.240CJ ii. 969b; Harl. 164, ff. 301v-302; Add. 18777, f. 158.

About a week before the negotiations at Oxford were due to commence, in mid-March 1643, Essex informed the Commons of a royalist conspiracy to seize Bristol and of his intention to take to the field – which D’Ewes interpreted, probably correctly, as a design by the fiery spirits to undermine the treaty.241CJ ii. 995a, 995b; LJ v. 643b; Harl. 164, ff. 318v, 334. On 14 March, Pym, Vane, John Glynne and Roger Hill II were appointed managers of a conference with the Lords concerning measures for publicising the Bristol conspiracy, punishing its instigators and sending instructions to all Parliament’s forces to disarm and otherwise suppress malignants.242CJ ii. 1002b, 1003a. But when the finished propositions were read to the Commons on 18 March, D’Ewes estimated that

above three parts of the House then present were for peace, so as though we almost differed on every article [proposition], yet the plurality of voices was so evident and apparent as we never divided the House. And this, I conceive, was one cause also that Sir Philip Stapilton, Sir Henry Vane the younger, Mr Hampden and others did absent themselves, because they easily foresaw that it would not lie in their power to stop the said articles.243Harl. 164, f. 334.

One of the Vanes – again, probably Vane II – was a minority teller with Henry Marten on 6 April against giving Parliament’s commissioners at Oxford the power to treat beyond the allotted time, which would end the next day.244CJ iii. 33a; Harl. 164, f. 359. A report that Vane attended the negotiations at Oxford in person and helped to manage a debate with the king’s negotiating team on the matter of oaths and declarations is very hard to credit. He certainly received no official authorisation to attend the negotiations.245HMC 10th Rep VI, 150.

Vane emerged over the course of 1642-3 as an important figure in the Commons’ – and, more particularly, the war party’s – relations with the earl of Essex and his staff. By late 1642, Vane was a fringe member of that relatively small group of MPs whom the Commons employed to liaise with and generally pay court to the lord general.246CJ ii. 851b, 892b. The lacklustre performance of the earl’s army during the first six months of the war engendered a more critical attitude among MPs towards their commander-in-chief and prompted the establishment of several committees – to which Vane was probably appointed – for scrutinising his army’s accounts and troop strength.247CJ iii. 9b, 30b, 53a. Nevertheless, Vane’s appointments and speeches in the spring of 1643 suggest that, like Pym and other war-party grandees, he remained concerned to ensure that Essex and his army received their due share of supplies and honours.248CJ iii. 59b, 61b, 80a; Harl. 164, f. 380. On 27 April, for example, he was named first to the Commons’ contingent of a committee of both Houses to ask the City authorities for ‘further supply of the army at this time, that they may not want but be encouraged to continue in action’, and to recommend that the Commons Council raise horse and foot for securing London or strengthening the lord general’s army ‘as there shall be occasion’.249CJ iii. 62a. Following Hampden’s death in June it was rumoured that the Commons had chosen Vane to replace him as a ‘superintendent’ over Essex, ‘not only to inflame his Excellency’s cold affections but to kindle a more fiery spirit of rebellion in his wavering soldiers’.250Mercurius Aulicus no. 27 (2-8 July 1643), 348 (E.60.18).

Vane’s support for the lord general, which was undoubtedly abraided by Essex’s dilatory generalship, finally snapped in mid-July 1643 in response to a letter from the lord general suggesting that in light of his army’s weaknesses the two Houses should sue for peace or seek what amounted to trial by combat.251CJ iii. 160b; LJ vi. 127b. When this letter was read out in the Commons some of the fiery spirits were observed to ‘pluck their hats over their eyes’ in frustration.252Harl. 165, f. 122; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 116. Speaking with barely concealed sarcasm on 11 July, Vane observed that ‘seeing we had neglected upon the several messages of the Lords to entertain consideration of sending propositions to his Majesty, the lord general had done well to stir us up to it’, adding that he took the import of Essex’s letter to be that ‘if we would send propositions of peace to his Majesty and they did not take effect, that then he [Essex] would do his duty’. Stapilton and another of Essex’s officers, Arthur Goodwin, rounded on Vane for implying that the lord general ‘would not do his duty but upon condition’, and they were not convinced by his insistence that he ‘had not thought of laying any aspersion upon my lord general’.253Harl. 165, ff. 123v-124. Essex himself certainly took offence, and with equally heavy sarcasm he requested the Commons that Vane be sent

as an eye-witness of our actions, he being an intimate friend of mine and who, by his constant carriage in the Parliament, which hath gotten him a good repute in all place, may be a true testimony of our actions ... He is, besides, a man I put so much trust in as that if he pleaseth I shall go hand in hand with him to the walls of Oxford.254Bodl. Tanner 62, f. 166; Harl. 165, f. 126; Add. 31116, p. 124; Mercurius Aulicus no. 29 (16-22 July 1643), 380-1 (E.63.2).

The Solemn League and Covenant, 1643

Vane’s keenness to bring the Scots into the civil war would have done little to endear him to the lord general as he struggled to compete for a share of Parliament’s already straitened resources. Since early 1642, and increasingly from that autumn, Vane had been named alongside Pym, Hampden and other (mostly war-party) MPs to committees for liaising with the Scots or drafting declarations designed to consolidate ties between Westminster and Edinburgh.255CJ ii. 386a, 449b, 737a, 738a, 803b, 813a, 819b, 832a, 901b, 949b; iii. 46a, 82a. As evidence of Essex’s inability or unwillingness to push for absolute victory mounted during the spring of 1643, Vane and other war-party MPs tried to pressure the peace party in the Lords into appointing parliamentary commissioners to negotiate a military pact with Edinburgh. According to one newsbook report, the Commons had selected Vane and Sir William Armyne for this mission as early as mid-May.256Supra, ‘Sir William Armyne’; CJ iii. 46a, 82a, 109b, 145a, 146b; LJ vi. 69b; Harl. 164, f. 209v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 20 (14-20 May 1643), 252 (E.104.21). By this stage, Vane and his fellow fiery spirits were beginning to lose patience with the more eirenic element in the Lords, and when the peers also blocked the creation of a new great seal, he was among those MPs who suggested that the Commons alone should issue a new seal.257Harl. 164, ff. 388, 389; 165, ff. 95v-96; Rowe, Vane, 16-17.

The discovery late in May 1643 of the plot of Edmund Waller* – a royalist conspiracy to deliver up London to the king – gave the war-party grandees further opportunity to coerce the opponents of a Scottish alliance – a stratagem in which Vane was deeply complicit. He was named to several committees and conference-management teams for investigating the plot, examining the conspirators and their links with the parliamentary peace interest and for milking the episode for propaganda purposes. His importance in the war party’s counsels is highlighted by his appointment on 31 May to a five-man ‘committee of safety’, headed by Pym, with a remit ‘to do whatever they think good to prevent the danger threatened to the safety of the kingdom and City’.258CJ iii. 110b, 117b, 119a, 126b, 128b, 133a; Harl. 164, ff. 210, 397v; Harl. 165, ff. 98, 103; Bodl. Nalson VIII, f. 293; Mercurius Aulicus no. 23 (4-10 June 1643), 300-1 (E.55.14). Pym used the Waller plot to introduce his Scottish-style oath and covenant, which Vane took on 6 June.259CJ iii. 118a. The establishment of the Westminster Assembly that summer (to which Vane was appointed on 7 June) was largely intended to serve the same purpose – of impressing the Scots with Parliament’s commitment to the ‘so-much-desired reformation in ecclesiastical matters in this church and kingdom and a nearer conjunction betwixt both [kingdom’s] churches’.260CJ iii. 119a, 119b; LJ vi. 140a. On 17 June, the Commons voted to add Vane and Thomas Hatcher to the MPs it had nominated on 30 May – Armyne and Henry Darley – as commissioners to go to Scotland to negotiate a military alliance.261CJ iii. 132b. In the event, both the peers named to this commission refused to participate, leaving the four MPs to convince the Scots ‘that both nations may be straitly united and tied for our mutual defence against the papists and prelatical faction and their adherents in both kingdoms and not to lay down arms till they shall be disarmed and subjected to the authority and justice of Parliament in both kingdoms respectively’.262LJ vi. 139a, 139b, 140b-142a; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 466; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 116.

Vane and his fellow parliamentary commissioners arrived at Edinburgh early in August 1643.263Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 466; LJ vi. 139a, 140a-142a. Hyde, Ludlowe, Sir Philip Warwick and Gilbert Burnet all insisted that it was Vane who did most of the talking on the English side in the negotiations with the Scots that produced the Solemn League and Covenant. Hyde went even further, describing Vane as ‘the principal contriver of it and the man by whom the committee in Scotland was entirely and stupidly governed ... since he was all in any business where others were joined with him’. Several of these writers also claimed that it was Vane who ‘altered and changed many expressions’ in the Covenant and inserted the crucial proviso ‘according to the word of God’, that allowed the English Parliament to avoid establishing a ‘rigid’ Presbyterian church in England.264Clarendon, Hist. 216, 221; Ludlow, Mems. i. 65; Warwick, Mems. Charles I (1701), 266; G. Burnet, The Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton (1677), 237, 240. The Scottish church historian Robert Wodrow, writing in the early eighteenth century, was adamant that Vane had ‘tricked Scotland in that affair’, although he claimed that the Covenanter grandee Lord Balmerino had objected not to the phrase ‘according to the word of God’ but to what followed it: ‘and the example of the best Reformed churches’.265R. Wodrow, Analecta: or Materials for a Hist. of Remarkable Providences (Edinburgh, 1841), ii. 240.

Whether Vane was indeed as cynical or the Scots as gullible as these accounts of the Anglo-Scottish alliance negotiations suggest is very much open to question. The Scots’ original draft of the Covenant had included a similar qualifying phrase; the Church of England was to be reformed ‘according to the same holy word’.266C.S. Wright, ‘Conflicts of Conscience: English and Scottish Political Thought, 1637-53’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2018), 114. Baillie’s near-contemporary account of the negotiations referred to Vane and the godly minister Stephen Marshall as the draftsmen of all the English commissioners’ writings. But he did not single out Vane when asserting that the English commissioners would have preferred a purely military alliance to a ‘religious Covenant’ and that they were keen on ‘keeping of a door open in England to Independency’.267Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 89, 90; H. Guthry, Mems. (Glasgow, 1747), 135-9. The first Scottish commentator to accuse Vane of having inserted ‘according to the word of God’ for underhand reasons – ‘to make and cast all loose ... that it [the Covenant] might only serve as a politic engine for a time and then [be] laid aside’ – was Archibald Johnston of Wariston*, who was writing over 15 years after the event and was by that point Vane’s bitter opponent.268Wariston Diary, 171. At the time of the negotiations, certainly, the Scots considered the amendments to the Covenant of little account and generally ‘for the better’.269Wright, ‘Conflicts of Conscience’, 114. If the English commissioners had indeed wanted to qualify the Covenant’s terms regarding church reformation in England, they would be seconded by the Westminster Assembly, which attempted to replace the phrase ‘according to the word of God’ with the much looser ‘as far as in my conscience I shall conceive it to be according to the word of God’.270J. Lightfoot, The Whole Works ed. J.R. Pitman (1824), xiii. 10; C. Van Dixhoorn, ‘Scottish influence on the Westminster Assembly’, Recs. Scottish Church Hist. Soc. xxxvii. 76-8; Wright, ‘Conflicts of Conscience’, 114-15.

The question of whether the commissioners’ achievement in Edinburgh was primarily Vane’s work or more of a collective effort is perhaps not of great significance anyway, given the Scots’ evident eagerness to invade England again and that the commissioners were building upon the substantial foundations for an Anglo-Scottish military alliance laid down by the 1641 treaty of London, which had made provision for cross-border intervention ‘for repressing of those that shall happen to arise in arms or make war without the consent of their own Parliament’.271Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 371.

Although Vane may have been more eloquent and loquacious than his colleagues in the negotiations with the Scots, Sir William Armyne and Henry Darley were at least his equals in terms of connections with the war-party grandees and experience in Anglo-Scottish relations.272Supra, ‘Sir William Armyne’; ‘Henry Darley’; D. Scott, ‘Yorkshire’s godly incendiary’, in Life and Thought in the Northern Church ed. D. Wood (Oxford, 1999), 451. If Vane was indeed ‘all in any business’ among the English commissioners, it is also worth noting that after his return to England in mid-October to make a progress report to Parliament, Armyne and Darley proved quite capable of hammering out, in his absence, an additional treaty establishing a joint Anglo-Scottish command in Ireland.273CJ iii. 289b, 291b; LJ vi. 275, 277b, LJ vi. 365b, 366b; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 104. Before leaving Scotland, Vane took the Covenant himself and would take it again, at Westminster, on 2 November.274Guthry, Mems. 141; CJ iii. 299a.

Given his emergence by the end of 1644 as a leading opponent of Scottish-style Presbyterianism, it is hardly surprising that his support for the Covenant in 1643-4 would later be regarded as rank hypocrisy. At his trial in 1662, he admitted that he had reverenced

not so much ... the form and words of the Covenant as the righteous and holy ends therein expressed and the true sense and meaning thereof, which I have reason to know ... But that as to the manner of the prosecution of the Covenant to other ends than itself warrants and with a rigid and oppressive spirit – to bring all dissenting minds and tender consciences under one uniformity of discipline and church government – it was utterly against my judgement.275Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 61.

Managing the Anglo-Scottish alliance, 1643-4

It is only in the months following his return from Edinburgh in October 1643 that Vane emerged among the front-rank of politicians at Westminster. By the end of that year he had joined the earl of Northumberland, Viscount Saye and Sele, Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, St John and Hesilrige as one of the undisputed grandees of a re-configured war party (the core of which would form the Independent interest) – a faction bent on leashing in Parliament’s power-hungry yet eirenic lord general and pushing for absolute victory followed by a dictated settlement that would leave Charles little better than a puppet monarch.

Central to the war-party grandees’ plans for a swift, military conclusion to the war was the large Scottish army, secured by the Covenant treaty, and the armies of the eastern and southern associations under Edward Montagu†, 2nd earl of Manchester and Sir William Waller* respectively. A high proportion of Vane’s appointments between returning from Scotland in October 1643 and his mission to Parliament’s armies in the north in June 1644 related in one way or other to advancing the pro-Scottish alliance group’s strategy for managing the war and dictating the terms of settlement. This was to be one of the busiest periods in his parliamentary career, seeing him named to approximately 60 committees and 30 conference-management teams.276CJ iii. 290a, 296b, 297a, 311b, 317b, 327b, 330b, 334b, 340b, 349b, 359a, 363a, 378a, 380b, 396a, 397b, 398b, 418b, 423b, 429a, 432a, 433a, 441a, 441b, 446a, 449a, 457b, 458b, 479a, 486a, 489a. In addition, he served as a teller in seven divisions and as messenger to the Lords on eight occasions.277CJ iii. 292b, 304b, 324b, 332b, 337a, 347b, 350a, 370a, 384a, 391b, 424b, 443a, 458b, 478a; LJ vi. 278b, 318a, 330a, 336a, 348b, 405a, 539a; Harl. 166, f. 28. By this point in the war he was so deeply ‘engaged for the public in the House and several committees, from early in the morning to very late at night ... that he had scarce any leisure to eat his bread, converse with his nearest relations or at all to mind his family affairs’.278[Sikes], Sir Henry Vane, 105; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’.

Vane was distinctive even among the war-party grandees for the energy he devoted to promoting the Scots’ interests at Westminster and finding or urging money for their armies in Ireland and northern England. As a committeeman, reporter and manager of conferences, messenger to the Lords, a speaker in the House and as its spokesman to the City, he more than warranted the Scots’ description of him as ‘our most intime [intimate] friend ... whom we trusted most’ during 1643-4.279CJ iii. 289b, 290a, 296a, 296b, 340b, 349b, 380b, 387b, 408a, 409a, 418a, 419b, 428a, 453a, 456, 457b, 471b, 478a, 481a, 498a, 507a, 621a, 668a, 676a; LJ vi. 274a, 539a; Harl. 165, ff. 200, 233; Harl. 166, ff. 18, 22, 25v, 27-8, 31v, 33, 35, 42, 47, 52-3, 55, 62v, 65v, 69; Add. 18778, f. 78; Add. 18779, ff. 35v, 86; Add. 31116, pp. 172, 188, 201, 261, 334; Two Speeches Spoken at a Common Hall (1643), 3-8 (E.74.7); Mercurius Aulicus no. 10 (3-9 Mar. 1644), 872 (E.39.3); no. 12 (17-23 Mar. 1644), 888 (E.40.32); no. 19 (5-11 May 1644), 975 (E.49.23); Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 231, 235; Rowe, Vane, 47. He was a stalwart of the Committee for Scottish Affairs – what would become known as the Committee for Compounding* – attending its meetings regularly until early October 1644.280CJ iii. 299b, 349b, 624b; SP23/1A, pp. 1, 28; SP23/2, pp. 1, 29; SP46/106, ff. 95-6, 101-2, 107, 130, 132, 134, 151-2. And he was at the heart of the Commons’ drive in the spring of 1644 to overhaul the sequestration machinery in order to find money for the Scots and the war party’s other military good causes. The draft ordinance for ‘the better regulating the matter of sequestrations’ that he reported to the House on 27 April – and which formed the basis of the 25 May ordinance for revising the sequestration process – may be among the few pieces of legislation he penned during his parliamentary career.281Supra, ‘Committee for Sequestration’; Harl. 166, ff. 53-4; CJ iii. 453a-b, 469a, 471a, 473b, 497b, 500a, 506a; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 73, 79; A. and O. i. 437-41. Similarly, the interest he showed from late 1643 in managing the excise was probably stimulated by his concern to offload some of the financial burden of supplying the Scots onto the City (where most of the excise was collected).282CJ iii. 310a, 331a, 378b, 393a, 551b; Two Speeches Spoken at a Common Hall, 3-8.

In his determination to channel parliamentary resources towards the Scots, Vane was prepared to cross swords with his father and Sir William Waller – a commander he was otherwise keen to support, particularly in his defiance of Essex.283CJ iii. 383b, 360a; Harl. 165, f. 213v; Harl. 166, ff. 32v, 47, 63v; Add. 18779, f. 7v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 14 (31 Mar.-6 Apr. 1644), 915 (E.43.18). In a crucial division on 22 December 1643 he served as a majority teller with Oliver St John in favour of placing all of Westminster’s and Edinburgh’s forces in Ireland under one, Scottish commander. Without such an appointment, argued Vane, ‘the Scots would return again into Scotland and so Ireland would be quite lost’.284CJ iii. 350a; Harl. 165, f. 254. Vane and St John were among the ten prominent Commons-men who served as pall-bearers at the funeral in December of the Anglo-Scottish alliance’s principal architect, Pym.285Perfect Diurnall no. 21 (11-18 Dec. 1643), 165 (E.252.11).

Vane and St John seem to have been working closely together in the Commons by November 1643 at the latest, and theirs would prove to be one of the most enduring and effective political partnerships at Westminster during the mid-1640s.286CJ iii. 304b; Harl. 165, ff. 221, 241, 254, 276; Harl. 166, ff. 7, 29v, 33, 62, 64v, 81v; Add. 31116, p. 210; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 117, 133, 141, 145, 230; Rowe, Vane, 27-8, 34. It was Vane and St John, acting in concert with the Scots commissioners and the war-party minority in the Lords, who spearheaded efforts in the Commons to secure the establishment of the Committee of Both Kingdoms* (CBK) in February 1644. The two men were ably supported by their fellow MPs Hesilrige, Edmund Prideaux I, William Strode I and Zouche Tate. This new Anglo-Scottish executive, of which Vane was an active and influential member, was used as a platform not only to manage the war effort in England and Ireland but also to curb the political ambitions of the earl of Essex. Clearly, the idea for such a body had emerged from the lengthy deliberations between the Scots and their leading English friends during the second half of 1643.287Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; M.P. Mahony, ‘The Presbyterian Party in the Long Parl. 2 July 1644-3 June 1647’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1973), 64-79, 99-100; J. Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy’, in Parliament at Work ed. C. Kyle, J. Peacey (Woodbridge, 2002), 111, 114, 116, 127. Vane was apparently involved in finalising the draft of the CBK ordinance introduced in the Lords on 1 February 1644.288Adamson, ‘Triumph of oligarchy’, 106. But the claim that it was his ‘brain-child’ or that the two ordinances establishing the committee were Vane’s work is completely without foundation.289Rowe, Vane, 35, 249. The editor of Mercurius Aulicus, who had exceptionally good contacts at Westminster, stated that the ‘first authors of this new committee’ were Saye and St John.290Mercurius Aulicus no. 7 (11-17 Feb. 1644), 828 (E.35.27).

The growing support of Essex and his adherents for a negotiated settlement was strengthened late in 1643 with the embassy of the comte D’Harcourt – the most high-ranking French diplomat to visit England in over a generation. The Essexians as well as the royalists looked to French influence with the Scots to avert a Covenanter invasion and help to broker a peace in England. Consequently, Vane was at the forefront of attempts by the Scots’ friends at Westminster to portray Harcourt’s mission as an affront to parliamentary authority and a threat to the Anglo-Scottish alliance.291CJ iii. 311b, 312a, 316b, 317b, 318b, 325b, 327a, 327b, 330b, 335a, 363a; LJ vi. 322a; Harl. 165, f. 256; Add. 18779, ff. 8-9, 11v, 20, 35; Add. 31116, pp. 187, 206; Mahony, ‘Presbyterian Party’, 61. His motion on 22 November for the Westminster Assembly to write to the Reformed churches on the continent, warning them of the ‘great artifices and disguises of his Majesty’s agents in those part’, was almost certainly part of a broader campaign to depict royalist intrigues – and, by implication, the Harcourt mission – as part of a general European conspiracy to introduce popery.292Harl. 165, f. 214v.

With the earl of Essex’s abandonment of the war party late in 1643, and the promise of powerful military assistance from the Scots, Vane added his voice to those in the Commons determined to cut the lord general and his army down to size and to prevent the re-admission to Parliament of his cousin, Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland, who had defected to the king that summer.293CJ iii. 347a, 347b, 349a, 349b, 384a, 423b, 424b; LJ vi. 347, 348b, 405a; Harl. 165, f. 242; Harl. 166, ff. 32v, 56; Harl. 483, f. 12v; Add. 18779, ff. 23, 38; Juxon Jnl. 43; Rowe, Vane, 25-6. Speaking on 17 January 1644 in support of a report by Samuel Browne’s that Holland be impeached for high treason, Vane asked

After we have voted and made declarations that such as desert the Parliament are traitors – if such a lord shall come and claim as his birthright to sit as a peer in the Parliament without any acknowledgement of his fault ... what will become to [sic] all our ordinances? By this reason any lord now in Oxford may come hither and claim to sit in Parliament. What will become of it? They may come hither and sit and over-vote us and [go] away again. This will bring us into a pretty strait. Therefore, we must find a means to avoid this inconvenience; otherwise we give up our liberties and acknowledge that is in the Lords House to acquit men of treason without the Commons of England.294Add. 18779, f. 49.

At the conclusion of this debate, Vane was a teller with Hesilrige in favour of declaring Holland guilty of deserting Parliament. The opposing tellers were the Essexian grandees Holles and Stapilton.295CJ iii. 370a.

As well as using the earl of Holland’s treachery as a stick with which to beat their political opponents, Vane, St John and other pro-Scots grandees skillfully stage-managed revelations of royalist plotting against Parliament in order to discredit the peace interest at Westminster and in the City.296CJ iii. 358b, 359a, 360b; Harl. 483 (entry 6 Jan. 1644); Add. 18779, ff. 40v, 43; Add. 31116, pp. 210, 211; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 133; Mercurius Aulicus no. 2 (7-13 Jan. 1644), 773-4; Mahony, ‘Presbyterian Party’, 59-60. It is a measure of Vane’s perceived importance at Westminster by the winter of 1643-4 that the king sanctioned one group of royalist plotters, led by John Lovelace, 2nd Baron Lovelace, to make peace overtures to him, promising liberty of conscience to those puritans who wished to remain outside of a re-established episcopal church. This clumsy attempt by Charles to drive a wedge between the Scots and the English opponents of Presbyterianism and thereby to heighten divisions at Westminster more generally was quickly seen for what it was by Vane and his ‘intimate friends’ St John, Hesilrige and Browne – although Vane strung the royalists along, ‘hoping by this means to discover more of the counsels of Oxford’. His trepanning was unexpectedly rewarded in mid-January, when Essex, having stumbled across the Lovelace plot, tried to have Vane court-martialled for holding ‘correspondency with the enemy’. Vane was able to demonstrate to the Commons’ satisfaction that he had been acting with the full knowledge of the Speaker and other leading MPs, thus making Essex look both foolish and a would-be violator of Commons’ privileges.297CJ iii. 369b, 376a, 378a; LJ vi. 381b; Harl. 165, ff. 281-2; Harl. 483, f. 12; Add. 18779, f. 48v; Add. 31116, pp. 216-17, 220-1; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 135-7; Anti-Aulicus (1644), 6 (E.31.17); A Secret Negotiation with Charles the First ed. B.M. Gardiner (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxxi), pp. xi-xiii; Juxon Jnl. 42; Rowe, Vane, 42-5; Mahony, ‘Presbyterian Party’, 62-3.

The political capital that Vane and other pro-Scots grandees accumulated in exploiting the saga surrounding the earl of Holland’s re-admission and Essex’s blunder over the Lovelace plot would prove valuable in the broader struggle during early 1644 to set up the CBK. Under colour of creating an efficient instrument to expedite the war, Vane and his friends were able to pursue their attack upon the lord general’s authority and to frustrate calls for an immediate renewal of peace negotiations. Thus Vane was keen to have the determination of Parliament’s terms for settlement left not to a committee of both Houses – as the Essexians demanded – but to the CBK, where the pro-Scots interest could control both their content and rate of evolution.298Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 418b, 423a, 423b, 428b, 429a, 432a, 433a, 434b, 476b, 441a, 441b, 443a, 446a, 449a, 454a, 458b, 466a; Harl. 166, ff. 29v, 55, 81v; Add. 31116, p. 244; Rowe, Vane, 50-1; Mahony, ‘Presbyterian Party’, 84-5, 89-90. He was also a conspicuous member of the group in the Commons determined to strengthen the earl of Manchester’s command over the Eastern Association army to the point where he could operate completely independently of the lord general’s authority.299CJ iii. 472b, 475a, 479a, 486a, 486b; LJ vi. 534a; Harl. 166, ff. 53v, 58; Mahony, ‘Presbyterian Party’, 94-5.

On 3 June 1644, the CBK dispatched Vane northwards to confer with the commanders of the English and Scottish armies that had recently converged to besiege York – namely, the earl of Manchester, Alexander Leslie, 1st earl of Leven and the general of Parliament’s northern army, Ferdinando Fairfax, 2nd Baron Fairfax*. Accompanied by Fairfax’s principal man-of-business, William White*, Vane was to sound out the three generals about the CBK’s proposal to send a large force across the Pennines to rescue the Lancashire parliamentarians from Prince Rupert. Evidently Vane’s mission was part of a broader effort by the CBK to tighten its grip on field operations, for that same day it sent John Crewe I* to liaise with the earl of Essex. In the event, the three generals quickly persuaded Vane of the impracticality of the CBK’s plan, and he returned to London before the end of the month.300Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’: CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 197, 198, 207-8, 223-5, 229, 241-2, 257, 287-8; Rowe, Vane, 52-3.

Both the Venetian envoy and the French ambassador alleged that Vane used his mission to persuade the three generals and – having travelled secretly into Scotland – the Covenanter leadership to back a design for deposing the king and replacing him with the elector palatine.301PRO31/3/75, ff. 17, 32v-33; CSP Ven. 1643-7, pp. 110, 112, 116; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, i. 368-9; Rowe, Vane, 53-5. Why the CBK should have sent Vane, a confirmed civilian, to impart its strategic insights to the generals is certainly puzzling. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that an astute politician like Vane would lend himself to a venture that risked jeopardising the Anglo-Scottish alliance, not to mention his own career if the two Houses ever learned of it – especially when he must surely have known that the Scots would reject any suggestion of deposing their native king. Rather than plotting to depose the king, Vane here was himself the victim of an attempted smear campaign by his avowed enemy the earl of Holland, who fed the story to his diplomatic friends in an attempt to discredit Vane with the Scots.302L. Kaplan, ‘The ‘plot’ to depose Charles I in 1644’, BIHR xliv. 216-23. Vane had resumed his place in the Commons by 1 July, when he delivered a full report of his proceedings in Yorkshire. In returning him the thanks of the House, the Speaker was ‘adulatory’, asking ‘who else would take such a journey upon their own cost?’303CJ iii. 547b; Harl. 166, ff. 78v-59

If Vane was indeed complicit in a conspiracy during the summer of 1644, it was more probably directed against the earl of Essex than the king. When, on 16 July, the CBK opted against sending Waller’s much depleted army into the west country in support of the increasingly beleaguered lord general, Vane forcefully defended this decision in the Commons, arguing that Waller lacked the men and money for effective military action and that the House should leave the managing of Parliament’s forces to the committee. Holles and other Essexians retorted that ‘this was to lose the west and to expose the earl of Essex’s army to unnecessary danger’. It is very likely, although impossible to prove, that Vane worked covertly with Waller and Hesilrige in agitating against rescuing Essex from the consequences of his own pride and folly in marching into the west country against the CBK’s orders.304Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; CJ iii. 563b; Harl. 166, f. 98v; Add. 31116, p. 301.

Resisting a ‘covenanted uniformity’, 1644-7

Vane’s prodigious appetite for parliamentary business probably contributed to the several bouts of illness he suffered in the mid-1640s. He took brief leaves of absence in August 1644, July 1645 and April 1646 – on the first and last occasions ‘to take some course for the preservation of his health’.305CJ iii. 576a; iv. 223b, 515b. Leaving aside his assignments at Derby House and his numerous reports from the CBK to the Commons, his tally of Commons’ appointments in the two years or so between his northern mission in June 1644 and the king’s surrender to the Scots in May 1646 suggests that his work-rate at Westminster dropped slightly from the highs of 1643-4.306Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 418a, 423a, 453a, 456, 470b, 481a, 486b, 507a, 556a, 563b, 620b, 626b, 638a, 650a, 668a, 673a, 675b, 717a; iv. 9a, 90b, 159a, 231a, 267a, 307a, 474b, 546a; Harl. 166, ff. 69, 239v. He was named to no more than 100 committees and a dozen teams for reporting or managing conferences and served as a messenger to the Lords eight times.307CJ iii. 574a, 676a, 676b, 686a, 710b, 730a; iv. 27b, 29b, 34a, 68a, 194b, 216b, 335a, 379a, 393b, 425b, 448a, 452a, 457a; LJ vii. 31a, 108a, 153a, 507a, 679b; viii. 76a, 183b. The ‘Sir Henry Vane’ who featured as teller on 12 divisions in this period can be identified in most cases as Vane II.308CJ iii. 617a, 647a, 672b, 700b, 726a, 729b; iv. 26a, 144b, 296a, 303b, 341b, 511b.

If Vane II was indeed marginally less prominent in parliamentary proceedings from the summer of 1644 it was probably linked to the collapse that autumn of the war party’s alliance with the Scots. The fact that Vane ceased to attend the Committee for Compounding from early October and put in only 84 appearances at the CBK during 1645 – four less than his great enemy the earl of Essex – are small but telling indications that championing the Scots’ political and military interests was no longer his priority. New issues would arise to test his political mettle – the Self-Denying Ordinance, new modelling, ecclesiastical settlement – but now he was part of a larger and more powerful faction than he had been in 1643-4. The Independent interest that emerged during the second half of 1644 would include not only war-party stalwarts, like Vane, but also senior army figures – notably, Oliver Cromwell – as well as the former peace-party grandees the earls of Pembroke and Salisbury, William Pierrepont and Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire. The Scots commissioners registered the emergence of this new faction early in 1645, when they perceived a parliamentary delegation to the Scottish Parliament – which Vane, Pierrepont and St John helped to organise – as an underhand design by Vane, St John and others ‘who profess to be our friends’ to gather potentially damaging intelligence in Edinburgh.309CJ iv. 7b, 9b; LJ vii. 123b; Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen ed. R. Chambers (1870), ii. 401.

The occasion, if not necessarily the cause, of Vane’s estrangement from the Scots was his public support for liberty of conscience. In the interests of maintaining the Anglo-Scottish alliance he studiedly avoided giving open encouragement to the Independent divines in the Westminster Assembly (although Saye, Wharton, Vane and St John would later be accused of having given ‘secret advice’ to the Dissenting Brethren).310Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 146; Vox Veritatis (1650), 5-6 (E.616.6). However, he was willing to stomach the Scots’ desires for the establishment of Scottish-style Presbyterianism in England only so long as their army seemed capable of making a decisive contribution to winning the war. Once it became clear, as was the case by the autumn of 1644, that Scottish intervention would not win the war for Parliament, Vane and his friends moved rapidly from acquiescing in a ‘covenanted uniformity’ in religion to agitating for a less rigidly Presbyterian church settlement.311Mahony, ‘Presbyterian Party’, 107.

Baillie claimed that Vane and St John, ‘our greatest friends’, were the ‘main procurers’ of the ‘committee for accommodation’ in mid-September 1644 – an attempt initiated by St John and Cromwell to reach a compromise with the Scots over church government before the Westminster Assembly could pronounce on the matter and before any treaty with the king.312CJ iii. 626a; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 230. Although Vane, St John and their allies clearly wanted a church settlement that would allow liberty to ‘tender consciences, who cannot in all things submit to the common rule which shall be established’, it is not clear from the debates in the committee for accommodation – in which Vane figured prominently – exactly how far they wished this liberty to extend.313G. Gillespie, Notes of Debates and Procs. of the Assembly of Divines, ed. D. Meek (Edinburgh, 1846), 103-7; Y. Chung, ‘Parliament and the cttee. for accommodation 1644-6’, PH xxx. 289-308. Baillie was adamant that Vane had ‘twice, at out table, prolixly, earnestly and passionately ... reasoned for a full liberty of conscience to all religions, without any exceptions’ – in other words, toleration.314Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 230, 231, 235. But this, as Baillie made clear, was Vane’s ‘table talk’. Roger Williams may well have been referring to Vane when he recounted in 1644 having heard a ‘heavenly speech’ by one of the ‘most eminent’ members of the Long Parliament in which the speaker asked ‘why should the labours of any be suppressed if sober, though never so different?’.315R. Williams, Mr Cottons Letter Lately Printed (1644), preface (E.31.16). However, it is by no means evident that Vane (if the speech was indeed his) made this oration in Parliament or any public forum. Certainly none of the parliamentary diarists, the newsbooks writers or the Scots picked up on such a speech, which they surely would have done given its controversial nature.

Too clever a politician not to realise that openly advocating comprehensive religious toleration would quickly lose him the support of his fellow Independent grandees, Vane does not appear to have publically endorsed such a policy before the early 1650s.316J. Coffey, ‘Puritanism and liberty revisited’, HJ xli. 968, 969. In the committee for accommodation, for example, he said nothing that might embarrass his collaborators Saye, Wharton, St John and Marshall who favoured, or at least accepted as a political necessity, the establishment of a national Presbyterian church – but one over which Parliament retained ultimate authority and that extended liberty of conscience at least to ‘orthodox’ religious Independents.317Gillespie, Notes of Debates ed. Meek, 103-7; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 235-7; Chung, ‘Parliament and the cttee. for accommodation’, 303; Coffey, ‘Puritanism and liberty revisited’, 963. In the Commons, Vane confined himself to opposing several of the more Presbyterian elements in the ordination ordinance. He objected to the stipulation requiring ministers to take the Covenant, and he and St John were majority tellers on 1 October against retaining a clause enjoining congregants to ‘obey and submit’ to their minister ‘as being over them in the Lord’.318CJ iii. 647a; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 235. Behind the scenes, Vane and Hesilrige ‘quarrelled mightily’ with the Scots over this question and, more generally, whether ‘ordination is an ordinance of Christ’, prompting the Scottish divine George Gillespie to ask if ‘these things are opposed, what hopes are there of carrying the whole government [i.e. effecting a Presbyterian church settlement] and Directory [of Worship]?’319Gillespie, Notes of Debates ed. Meek, 67.

Rather than urge full toleration from the outset, Vane tried to shift the grounds of debate in 1644-5 from ecclesiological to theological differences, thereby leaving ‘freedom of church government to be inferred by omitting all mention of this topic’.320Rowe, Vane, 195. In sidestepping the vexed question of church government, Vane was adopting the tactic that he and his colleagues on Parliament’s Committee for Foreign Plantations* (CFP) had employed in the spring of 1644 when they had granted a patent uniting and incorporating Providence and adjacent settlements as the Providence Plantations, later known as Rhode Island. The patent had authorised the Providence planters to ‘rule themselves ... by such a form of civil government as by voluntary consent of all, or the greater part of them, they shall find most suitable to their estate and condition’. By omitting all reference to the civil government’s role in spiritual matters, the patent had effectively endorsed complete freedom of worship.321Supra, ‘Committee for Foreign Plantations’; Rowe, Vane, 195-6.

Williams and his friends had certainly sought Vane’s help in establishing their new colony, and Williams would claim in 1658 that Vane had been instrumental in procuring the Providence Plantations patent in 1644.322J.D. Knowles, Memoir of Roger Williams (Boston, MA, 1834), 146; The Documentary Hist. of Rhode Is. (Providence, 1919), ii. 78-9, 126. However, this is to credit Vane with greater influence on the CFP than he would have possessed. The patent was signed not only by him but also by a number of leading Parliament-men who had little enthusiasm for toleration – at least in the context of a British church settlement. Heading the signatories was the committee’s chairman the earl of Warwick, whose familiarity with Williams may have rivalled, and almost certainly pre-dated, Vane’s. It was not Vane’s lobbying that prompted the CFP to endorse Providence Plantations but its own resolve to encourage godly colonisation and the conversion of New England’s native peoples – both of which causes the new colony seemed likely to advance – regardless of the intra-puritan divisions that were beginning to plague the issue of church settlement at home.323Supra, ‘Committee for Foreign Plantations’; Oxford DNB, ‘Roger Williams’.

Vane II’s role in establishing Providence Plantations in 1644 was not sufficiently prominent at the time to cause the new colony’s enemies in Massachusetts to cease all communication with him. The Bay Colony’s governor, John Winthrop senior, was still writing to Vane over a year after the patent was signed, while Vane felt secure enough in his relations with Winthrop to admonish him, gently, for his continued recourse to coercion in religious matters.

The exercise and troubles which God is pleased to lay upon these kingdoms and the inhabitants in them teaches us patience and forbearance one with another in some measure, though there be difference in our opinions, which makes me hope that, from the experience here, it may also be derived to yourselves, lest while the Congregational way amongst you is in its freedom and is backed with power it teach its oppugners here [i.e. the Scots and their English Presbyterian allies] to extirpate it and root it out, from its own principles and practice.324A Collection of Original Pprs. Relative to the History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay ed. T. Hutchinson (Boston, MA, 1769), 137.

When another New England puritan radical, the ‘Familist’ and ‘arch-heretic’ Samuel Gorton, requested the CFP’s help in 1646-7 in resisting the authority of the Bay Colony, Vane was notable by his absence. Leading Massachusetts men had expressed concern that Gorton would find a ‘potent friend’ in England – almost certainly a reference to Vane.325Winthrop Pprs. (Mass. Hist. Soc.), v. 87. Yet although Vane was apparently in or around Westminster in mid-May 1647 when the committee issued two warrants on Gorton’s behalf, he signed neither of them. It is revealing that on returning to New England in 1648, Gorton renamed his settlement after the CFP’s chairman – and no friend of Vane from 1646 – Warwick.326Supra, ‘Committee for Foreign Plantations’; Oxford DNB, ‘Samuel Gorton’.

While reportedly pressing in private for full toleration, Vane was associated publicly during the mid-1640s with the less controversial cause of promoting ‘patience and forbearance’ in church and spiritual matters – a policy that, in practice, worked to the advantage of the Congregationalists. On 4 August 1645, he was selected by the Commons to desire the ‘moderate Independent’ divine Joseph Caryl to preach the next fast sermon, and it was Vane and his fellow Independent grandee William Pierrepont who were tasked on 17 September with drafting a letter of thanks to Cromwell in response to his relation of the New Model army’s storming of Bristol, in which he had concluded with the controversial statement that ‘as for being united in forms, commonly called uniformity, every Christian will for peace-sake study and do, as far as conscience will permit, and from brethren in things of the mind we look for no compulsion but that of light and spirit’.327CJ iv. 229a, 277a; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 377; Oxford DNB, ‘Joseph Caryl’. This would have been music to Vane’s ears.

With the Scots, the Westminster Assembly and the London ‘Covenant-engaged’ interest all putting pressure on the two Houses to accede to a clericalist church settlement, Vane was among the leading defenders of Parliament’s supremacy in religion.328CJ iv. 280a, 348a, 511a; v. 11a; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 180; Juxon Jnl. 104. ‘We ought not to place an arbitrary power in any but the Parliament’, he told the Commons on 3 October 1645, ‘and so power was taken from them [the Westminster Assembly] and so they were not to judge but to represent it to the Parliament’.329Harl. 166, f. 266. If Parliament gave clergymen authority to discipline their congregants, he insisted, ‘they will many of them call that evil which is good and that which is good, evil. For the greater part of ministers are such as are not good ministers ... The Word purely preached and discreetly will reform more than this corrective power’.330Add. 18780, f. 134v. Given Vane’s entrenched hostility to clerical ‘corrective power’, it seems likely that the clerk of the House was in error in naming him as a teller with the Presbyterian grandee Sir Philip Stapilton on 10 October against adding the words ‘and not otherwise, until it be otherwise declared by both Houses of Parliament’, to the ordinance for suspending ignorant and scandalous persons from receiving communion. The effect of this clause, which the House approved and duly had inserted in the ordinance, was to restrict the clergy’s powers of exclusion from the sacrament, and it was opposed by the Scots and their allies (like Stapilton) accordingly.331CJ iv. 303b; G. Yule, Puritans in Politics (Oxford, 1981), 162, 197.

Away from the highly-charged battle for and against a covenanted uniformity, Vane was named to committees for promoting a godly preaching ministry and for trying to make the outspoken anti-Trinitarian Paul Best see the error of his ways.332CJ iv. 312a, 381b, 500a, 502a, 719b. In 1647, another anti-Trinitarian controversialist, John Biddle, would appeal to Vane for relief from his Presbyterian enemies at Westminster; although Vane’s support, claimed Wood, caused Biddle to be ‘confined more close than before’.333The Apostolical and True Opinion Concerning the Holy Trinity (1691), 5, 12-16; Ath. Ox. iii. 594; Rowe, Vane, 197-8; Oxford DNB, ‘John Biddle’. It was probably Vane’s well-known sympathy for religious radicals that prompted the imprisoned Leveller publisher William Larner to solicit his assistance in April 1646. Vane promised to present Larner’s case to the Commons, but by early June, Larner was still languishing in gaol, from where he wrote (and had published) an angry letter to Vane denouncing him and other MPs as self-interested hypocrites, full of ‘emptiness and wind’. It is not known whether Vane had a hand in securing Larner’s release from prison that October.334W. Larner, A Vindication of Every Free-mans Libertie (1646); Oxford DNB, ‘William Larner’.

Independent grandee, 1644-5

The alliance forged between the lord general’s interest and the Scots in the autumn of 1644 strengthened the Independents’ resolve to remodel Parliament’s war machine.335M. Mahony, ‘The Savile affair and the politics of the Long Parliament’, PH vii. 215. They lost one of the early skirmishes in the battle to establish the parameters of military reform when Vane and St John were minority tellers in a series of divisions on 3 September 1644 on whether to agree with the Lords in setting up a committee of both Houses – which the Essexians expected to dominate – for resolving the differences between Parliament’s field commanders and county committees. The majority tellers were Holles and Stapilton.336CJ iii. 617a.

The earl of Essex’s defeat at Lostwithiel in September 1644, and revelations that some of his senior officers had conspired with the royalists while in the west country, gave his enemies on the CBK the opportunity to set the process of new modelling in motion. Perhaps because Vane was identified by Essex and his supporters as their particular enemy, he was not named to the sub-committee that the CBK established in September to investigate the lord general’s officers – and which, the following month, was charged with the task of amalgamating Parliament’s armies into a consolidated command under tighter parliamentary control.337Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; Luke Lttr. Bks. 111. Once it became clear that Essex and his forces would be included in this consolidated army, Vane and St John tried to have the lord general’s infantry placed under the command of Major-general Philip Skippon*. To the Scots and the Essexians this was nothing short of an Independent plot ‘by Skippon’s foot and Cromwell’s horse to have made themselves masters of the fields [sic]’. What D’Ewes referred to as this ‘knavish packing’ by Vane and St John was exposed in the Commons by Glynne and ‘exploded’.338CJ iii. 655a; Harl. 166, f. 128v; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 235; Juxon Jnl. 59; Rowe, Vane, 49, 50. Vane took his revenge as a majority teller in divisions in October and November in favour of bringing Essex’s officers and political allies to book.339CJ iii. 672b, 700b.

When Zouche Tate made his motion for a self-denying ordinance, on 9 December 1644, Vane was among those who seconded him, and he was a majority teller with Evelyn of Wiltshire on 17 December against adding a proviso to the draft legislation that would have exempted the lord general from its provisions.340CJ iii. 726a; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 4. Two days later (19 Dec.), according to Hyde, Vane made a long speech, commending self-denying as the only means whereby MPs might prove themselves ‘public-hearted men’, who ‘gave up all their time to their country’s service without reward or gratuity’.341Clarendon, Hist. iii. 457-8, 507. Despite his offer on this occasion to lay down his office of navy treasurer, a clause in the ordinance, exempting those who had been dismissed by the king and re-appointed by Parliament, meant that he retained it – although with the proviso that he surrender half of his salary ‘for the use of the public’ (in fact, he apparently continued pocketing his full entitlement, which amounted to around £3,000 a year in the mid-1640s).342CJ iv. 207b; LJ vii. 499b-500a; Add. 31116, p. 440; Rowe, Vane, 58, 128-9; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 145-6.

There is no hard evidence to support claims that Vane was the author of or ‘framed’ the Self-Denying Ordinance, and the notion that it was he who ‘pushed the New Model and Self-Denying ordinances through Parliament’ is nonsense.343Rowe, Vane, 58, 59, 260; Donoghue, Fire under the Ashes, 165. Nevertheless, he was certainly involved by late 1644, both in the Commons and at Derby House, in devising measures for the New Model’s maintenance and for resisting pressure from the Essexians to frustrate wholesale military reform. Again, though, it is not clear whether it was he or his father who was named to committees set up on 6, 10 and 13 March 1645 for raising a City loan for the New Model and to justify the Commons’ adherence to the officer list submitted by Sir Thomas Fairfax* in the face of objections from Essex’s faction in the Lords.344CJ iv. 42b, 68a, 71a, 71b, 73b, 77a, 83b; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 204, 205; SP21/8, p. 161. His clearest contribution to new modelling came on 21 January, when he was a majority teller with Cromwell in favour of appointing Fairfax as commander of the new army.345CJ iv. 26a. He was equally prominent in the Independents’ opposition to a paper of the Scots commissioners, that Glynne reported from the CBK on 4 March, requesting that the Commons would be ‘careful to name officers [in the New Model] well affected to the uniformity of church government [i.e. the establishment of Scottish-style Presbyterianism in England]’.346Harl. 166, f. 181v. His status as an Independent grandee was confirmed on 31 March with his appointment to the Army Committee* – an ‘outrageously partisan’ body composed almost exclusively of the leading supporters of the New Model in both Houses.347LJ vii. 294a; Adamson, ‘Triumph of oligarchy’, 123. In October, he was among a raft of mostly Independent MPs that was added to the revived Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports*. In contrast to the Army Committee, the CACP was dominated by a powerful Presbyterian contingent, headed by the earl of Warwick, which probably explains why Vane and other Independents were not among its most assiduous members.348Supra, ‘Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports’; CJ iv. 297a; LJ vii. 624b; ADM7/673, ff. 1, 509v; R. McCaughey, ‘The English Navy, Politics and Administration 1640-9’ (New Univ. of Ulster Ph.D. thesis, 1983), 275-8.

As a member of the CBK and various ad hoc committees, and on the floor of the House, Vane was closely involved from the autumn of 1644 in perfecting the peace propositions (drawn up at the Scots’ behest in the CBK) and presenting them to the king’s commissioners at the treaty of Uxbridge in the spring of 1645.349Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 629a, 675b, 676a, 676b, 686a, 690a, 710b, 724b, 725b, 730a; iv. 9a, 27b, 29b, 34a; LJ vii. 108a, 153a; Harl. 166, ff. 151, 153, 154v. His willingness to forward what he would later refer to, dismissively, as ‘the business of peace’, almost certainly reflected the confidence of leading Independents that the king would never accept terms that comprehended the destruction of episcopacy and the sale of church lands.350CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 155. To oppose a treaty openly, therefore, was not only wasted effort but would also invite avoidable criticism. Cromwell and Hesilrige, to name but two of Vane’s factional allies, were apparently not so sure about this strategy, and on 19 December they were minority tellers in favour of amending Parliament’s message to the king in favour of a treaty; the majority tellers were Vane and Glynne. In D’Ewes’s account of this division ‘the votes of those who wanted peace carried the day’. 351CJ iii. 729b; Harl. 483, f. 155; Add. 31116, p. 360. Vane and St John were named to the Anglo-Scottish commission at the Uxbridge treaty (30 Jan.-22 Feb. 1645) but took little part in the negotiations – probably because they were convinced, correctly, that the talks would founder without any help from them. Hyde claimed that Vane, St John and Prideaux attended the negotiations merely to act as spies upon their fellow commissioners.352CJ iv. 19b, 24a; LJ vii. 143a; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 492; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, ii. 121. ‘All treaties will be useless’, Vane told the City fathers in March, ‘till they [Parliament] be in a posture to show themselves able to repel that opposition that can be made against them’.353Three Speeches Delivered in Guild-Hall (1645), 12 (E.273.3).

Vane’s personal commitment to supplying the Scottish army in England can be said to have ended early in October 1644, when he ceased attending the Committee for Compounding. Late that month, Baillie complained that Vane ‘had moved [in the House that] the mustering of our army as being far less than we were paid for’.354Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 235-6. After Sir Thomas Fairfax and other commissioners of both Houses residing with the armies in the north wrote to the CBK in early November, in effect denouncing the Scots as a military liability, the Commons appointed Vane and the Fairfaxes’ man-of-business Sir Thomas Widdrington to write to the commissioners, thanking them for their ‘great and faithful services’.355CJ iii. 691b; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 104-5. Nevertheless, the CBK and the Commons had realised by mid-November that wholesale remodelling of Parliament’s war machine would necessitate bringing the Scottish army southwards to provide cover while the new military order took shape. It was probably with some such calculation in mind that Vane was closely involved in the committee’s efforts from December 1644 to establish a more regular and reliable basis for paying the Scottish army – which was essential if the Scots were to be persuaded to move their forces southwards. His role in parliamentary efforts to supply the Scottish forces in Ulster probably had a less partisan motive, for the New Scots still represented the best hope for Protestant victory in northern Ireland.356Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 717a; iv. 29a, 78a, 84a, 121b, 159a, 167a; Add. 31116, p. 356. But overall he seems to have been very disappointed with the Scots’ contribution to the war effort. In April 1645, the French resident the comte de Sabran reported that at a recent meeting of the CBK, Vane II had accused the Scots of putting more effort into lining their own pockets with English money than into soldiering.357Add. 5461, f. 176.

Judging by Vane II’s appointments and activities during the summer of 1645 – particularly in relation to the Savile affair, the Scots’ garrisoning of Carlisle, and the controversy surrounding Richard Barwis* – he was a leading actor in the Independents’ struggle for political supremacy with the Scottish interest. He was included on most of the committees set up from that autumn to vent Parliament’s growing frustration with the conduct of the Scottish army, and in debate he complained that it had effectively slipped the leash of the CBK and, therefore, of Parliament.358CJ iv. 172b, 194b, 195a, 213a, 226a; Add. 18780, ff. 79v, 135v; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 279; Whitelocke, Diary, 171, 172; Rowe, Vane, 68-71; P. Crawford, ‘The Savile affair’, EHR xc. 83, 84, 85; Mahony, ‘Presbyterian Party’, 180; Adamson, ‘Triumph of oligarchy’, 126. On 16 September, he was named first to a committee ‘to digest ... into the form of an answer’ to the Scots commissioners a series of votes, demanding that if their army remained in England

then it must be disposed of upon such services and in such places where it may be of most advantage and use to the affairs of this kingdom. For if either their army or garrisons shall still continue in the north it will destroy those counties and dissolve the forces raised there.359CJ iv. 274b, 275a.

On 1 October, Vane and Hesilrige were minority tellers in favour of a motion that would effectively have transferred control of the Northern Association army from Sednham Poynts (a Presbyterian sympathiser) to the parliamentary Independents – with the ultimate objective, it seems, of turning it into a regional defence force against the Scots.360CJ iv. 296a; Harl. 166, f. 267; D. Scott, ‘The ‘northern gentlemen’’, HJ xlii. 361, 371. Three weeks later (21 Oct.), he was named to a committee of both Houses – which the Independents dominated – to complain of the Scots’ ‘great oppressions’ in the northern counties and that the continuance of their army in the north was ‘not only unserviceable but prejudicial to those ends for which their assistance was desired’.361CJ iv. 317a; LJ vii. 653b-654b; Corresp. of the Scots Commrs. ed. H. W.Meikle (Edinburgh, 1917), 127, 128. To the Scots commissioners these proceedings were nothing short of a design by ‘that party whose principles differ from us in matters of religion ... to be rid of our army and to have it returned home to Scotland, thereby to weaken our interest that they may the more easily obtain their own desires in matters of religion and of peace and war’.362Scots Commrs. ed. Meikle, 117, 129; Rowe, Vane, 74. Named first to a committee set up on 12 November to prepare a letter to the Scots demanding delivery of the English garrisons in their hands, he was a majority teller with Pierrepont the next day (13 Nov.) in favour of requiring their compliance by a specified date.363CJ iv. 340a, 341b. Vane’s letters to his father during the autumn of 1645 reveal his anger and sense of foreboding at the Scots’ ‘evils and mischiefs’ in the northern counties.364CSP Dom. 1645-7, pp. 105, 123, 138, 167, 183.

Vane remained in the vanguard of the Independents’ offensive against the Scottish interest during 1646 with appointment to conference-management teams and to committees – often in first or second place – to prosecute Parliament’s complaints over the abuses committed by the Scots’ forces in England.365CJ iv. 399b, 448a, 448b, 479b, 481b, 548b, 570b. In the early months of 1646, the king opened a secret line of communication with Vane – and, through him, with the Independent leadership generally – in an effort to secure a personal treaty that would free both the crown and the kingdom from a rigid Presbyterian settlement. Vane was singled out precisely because of his high-profile opposition to ‘that tyrannical government’. Like other Independents, however, Vane rejected this and similar overtures as a design to undermine ‘the public good and the interests of Parliament’. Only when these had been secured was he willing to entertain ‘conferences’ with the king.366Bodl. Clarendon 27, f. 77; Clarendon SP ii. 215, 226-7; Montereul Corresp. ed. J.G. Fotheringham (Scottish Hist. Soc. xxx), 130; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, ii. 71. Vane’s dismay at the prospect of a covenanted uniformity in religion almost certainly informed his participation in the tortuous proceedings surrounding the passage through the Houses of what would become the Newcastle Propositions. The Scots accepted these terms for settlement only grudgingly, for they had had begun life as an Independent-sponsored initiative to curtail Scottish influence in English and Irish affairs.367CJ iv. 379a, 393b, 423a, 425b, 428a, 454b, 457a, 478b, 490a, 491a, 554b, 564a, 575a, 576a, 576b, 584b, 586b, 587a, 604a, 606b, 613b; LJ viii. 76a, 361b; Rowe, Vane, 82-6; Scott, ‘Northern gentlemen’, 365-9.

Vane and the quest for settlement, 1646-8

When news of the king’s flight to the Scottish army at Newark reached Westminster on 6 May 1646, some Independents were angry, ‘others drooping sorrowful, but [all were] generally in a great fright’. Samuel Browne moved that the peace propositions should be sent to the king immediately, to which Vane replied that he was ‘not against the purpose, but it deserved consideration whether his Majesty was in a good place or not’ – in other words, could Charles be trusted now that he was in the power of the Scots? ‘I beseech you, Mr Speaker’, he continued, ‘let us not satisfy ourselves with votes, this is a time fitter for action. Let us put ourselves in a posture to stand upon our own legs, if they [the Scots] deny us reason’.368NAS, Clerk of Penicuik mss, GD 18/3110. The History of Parliament is grateful to Sir John Clerk of Penicuik for permission to publish extracts from this manuscript. On 11 May, Vane and Evelyn of Wiltshire were minority tellers in favour of demanding that the Scots hand over the king to Parliament and against a motion to the effect that the king surrender all his armies and garrisons immediately – that is, while he was in Scottish custody.369CJ iv. 542.

The king’s flight to the Scots in May 1646 would push Vane and allies onto the back foot at Westminster, and they would never fully recover the political initiative they had enjoyed since the forging of the Anglo-Scottish alliance late in 1643. Vane seems to have remained a member of the Independent grandees’ cabinet counsels, but the decline in his tally of appointments from the high of 1643-4 continued and steepened, suggesting that if he lived up to his reputation as a particularly dedicated member of the Long Parliament, he did so away from the floor of the House.370Rowe, Vane, 92-3. During the period May 1646 to December 1648, he was named to no more than 80 committees and to eight or nine conference-management teams (only one after 1646).371CJ iv. 541a, 554b, 564a, 576b, 606b, 613b, 624a; v. 32a, 379b. He also served as a teller in eight divisions – most of them on relatively minor matters – and as a messenger to the Lords no more than twice.372CJ iv. 542, 598a, 676b, 680a, 697b; v. 187b, 479a, 532a, 574a; LJ viii. 504a.

Distrust of the Scots and their French allies, and a desire to wrest possession of the king from them as soon as possible, accounted for a number of Vane’s more important appointments between July 1646 and January 1647.373CJ iv. 622b, 624a, 641a, 675a, 676b; v. 30a, 42b, 65b; LJ viii. 504a. His reaction to a paper from Scots commissioners in mid-August, complaining about the ‘calumnies and execrable aspersions cast upon the kingdom of Scotland in printed pamphlets’ and offering to withdraw their forces from England in return for ‘reasonable’ recompense is revealing. Whereas most MPs ‘generally approved’ of this paper, Vane ‘suspected it’ and voiced his opposition to a draft ordinance sent down from the Lords a few days later ‘for punishing the printers and contrivers of all scandalous pamphlets or papers against the kingdom of Scotland or their army residing here’.374CJ iv. 644b; LJ viii. 461b; Harington’s Diary, 32. Nevertheless, he played a part in the negotiations and deliberations that saw the House agree to pay £400,000 to the Scots to secure the departure of their army.375CJ iv. 660a, 721a; v. 1b, 11a, 12a; Rowe, Vane, 92.

So concerned were Vane and the Independent grandees at the prospect of the king reaching agreement with the Scots that in the autumn of 1646 they combined with the leading anti-Covenanter royalist the duke of Richmond to convey their own, secret, terms to Charles via the clerk of the closet (the cleric who controlled the king’s private chapel), Dr Richard Steward, who was ‘animated in the highest degree against the Scotch and Presbyterians’. If the king would allow limited religious toleration and wash his hands of the Covenant and Presbyterianism, Richmond and the Independent grandees offered to restore him to ‘the full execution of his regal authority’ and to establish a ‘moderated episcopacy’.376NAS, GD 406/1/2044; Colonel Joseph Bampfield’s Apology ed. J. Loftis, P.H. Hardacre (Lewisburg, 1993), pp. 48-9, 50; D. Scott, ‘Rethinking royalist politics, 1642-9, in The English Civil War ed. J. Adamson (Basingstoke, 2009), 54. This time it was the king’s turn to reject the Independents’ terms, confident that he could secure a better deal if the Houses allowed him to come to London to negotiate a personal treaty. On 28 December, Vane was part of a conference-management team for refusing the king’s offer of a personal treaty and making arrangements for his confinement to Holdenby House.377CJ v. 32a.

Vane seems to have attended the House only fitfully during the first seven months of 1647. Little can be inferred from his committee appointments – where they can be distinguished from those of his father – and there is no obvious pattern to his sporadic attendance at the CACP in these months, except that it appears to have been slightly less frequent than it had been late in 1646.378CJ v. 42b, 65b, 119b, 122b, 125a, 125b, 127b, 134a, 162b, 167a, 167b, 200a, 201a, 201b, 232a, 235b, 251b, 253a; ADM7/673, passim. Neither Vane I nor Vane II attended the Derby House Committee of Irish Affairs* (DHCIA) with any great regularity during 1647; most of the references simply to ‘Sir Henry Vane’ in the committee’s attendance lists probably relate to Vane I.379SP21/26, passim; D. Holles, Mems. (1699), 82. Hyde received intelligence in April that Vane II, Cromwell and Pierrepont ‘often forbear coming to the House’.380Bodl. Clarendon 29, f. 204. Vane I and II may have been complicit in the Independent machinations that led to Cornet Joyce’s removal of the king from Holdenby early in June, but the evidence is inconclusive.381SP28/49, ff. 498, 501; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, iii. 259, 265; Rowe, Vane, 97; C. Hoover, ‘Cromwell’s status and pay in 1646-7’, HJ xxiii. 710-11, 714.

Vane II’s most important appointment of 1647 was arguably his nomination as a commissioner of both Houses to the army, on 7 June.382CJ v. 201b, 202a; LJ ix. 247b. Vane spent most of June and July with his fellow commissioners at army headquarters, signing at least a dozen of letters to Parliament.383Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XLI, ff. 77r-v; LJ ix. 262a, 308b, 312a; Cary, i. 266, 275, 287, 288, 306, 308, 317, 319, 323; Clarke Pprs. i. 148; Rowe, Vane, 97-8. Both Holles and Waller saw the sending of commissioners to the army as an act of appeasement by Parliament and as a means of putting the Independent grandees and the army officers in closer proximity, ‘the better to contrive and lay their business’.384Holles, Mems. 90; W. Waller, Vindication of the Character and Conduct of Sir William Waller (1798), 142; Rowe, Vane, 97. A variety of commentators, from across the political spectrum, claimed that Vane was among a group of leading Independents responsible for the Heads of Proposals that the army presented to the king in July 1647. These terms for settlement may well have been a more developed version of those that Vane, Cromwell and the duke of Richmond had offered to Charles the previous year.385Beinecke Lib. Osborn fb155, f. 239; Westminster Proiects (1648), 1 (E.433.15); ‘The Tower of London letter-bk. of Sir Lewis Dyve’ ed. H.G. Tibbutt (Beds. Hist. Rec. Soc. xxxviii), 68.

Still at army headquarters when the two Houses were mobbed by Presbyterian protestors on 26 July 1647, Vane did not sign the declaration of the fugitive Members (mostly Independents) in which Fairfax and his men were eulogised for their ‘Christian, noble and public affection to the good, peace and prosperity of this kingdom’.386LJ ix. 385b.. But having returned to London with the army, Vane made a report to the House on 6 August, relating the commissioners’ proceedings ‘for these few days last past’ and praising the New Model for its efforts to ensure ‘the safe and free sitting of the Parliament’. At the conclusion of his report he read out the title of the Heads of Proposals and delivered them in to the House.387CJ v. 268a. Vane was named during August to several committees for repealing the legislation passed by the Houses during the absence of the Speaker and the other fugitive Members.388CJ v. 269a, 271b, 278a, 279b; [C. Walker*], Hist. of Independency (1648), 49 (E.463.19). But his most important assignment in August and September was undertaken behind the scenes, as part of the parliamentary team that worked with the army to revise and refine the Heads.389CJ v. 302a; J.S.A. Adamson, ‘Politics and the nobility in civil-war England’, HJ xxxiv. 248. Again, a variety of commentators placed Vane with the Independent grandees Saye, Wharton, St John, Fiennes, Cromwell and Henry Ireton in opposition not only to the Presbyterians but also to the radical Independent interest, headed by Henry Marten and Thomas Chaloner, and their Leveller allies. The radicals at Westminster and in London and the army were fiercely critical of the grandees’ continuing efforts that autumn to treat with the king on the basis of the Heads.390Supra, ‘Henry Ireton’; ‘Henry Marten’; Bodl. Clarendon 30, ff. 73, 76v, 211; J. Lilburne, Two Letters...to Col. Henry Martin (1647), 4-5 (E.407.41); Lilburne, The Iuglers Discovered (1647), 6 (E.409.22); Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 4 (5-12 Oct. 1647), sigs. D2v, D3 (E.410.19); no. 11 (23-30 Nov. 1647), sig. L3 (E.417.20); J. Wildman*, Putney Proiects (1647), 43 (E.421.19); Mercurius Militaris, no. 2 (10-17 Oct. 1648), 15 (E.468.35); [Walker], Anarchia Anglicana (1649), 6 (E.570.4); ‘Dyve letter-bk.’ ed. Tibbutt, 84, 89.

But Vane’s perceived importance in the Independent grandees’ counsels and stratagems was not reflected in terms of his parliamentary appointments. During the last four months of 1647 he was named to no more than 11 committees – and four of these appointments may have been his father’s. His role at Westminster in determining the shape of Parliament’s terms of settlement was apparently confined to whatever contribution he made to committees set up in September and October to address the concerns of the army and its allies over tithes and securing an exemption for ‘tender consciences’ from a national Presbyterian church.391CJ v. 302a, 322a, 327b, 331a, 340a, 359a, 364b, 366a, 373b, 379b, 385a. He attended the CACP a little more frequently after July and seems to have chaired a committee established in October to secure £30,000 from the customs commissioners for supply of the navy.392CJ v. 331a, 331b, 533b; ADM7/673, ff. 364v, 368v, 371, 381, 385, 413; Rowe, Vane, 94, 100. But having been granted leave for six weeks, on 10 December, he all but disappears from the Journals and the minute books of the DHCIA between 15 December and late March 1648.393CJ v. 378a, 385a, 474b, 505b, 506a, 519a, 519b; SP21/26, pp. 120, 145. He attended a meeting of the CACP on 8 February.394ADM7/673, p. 510. But his first recorded appearance at the re-formed CBK, the Derby House Committee* (DHC), was not until 23 March.395CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 35.

Vane’s sporadic attendance of the House and its committees during the early months of 1648 may well have signalled his unease at recent developments at Westminster. According to a correspondent of the Scottish peer James Hamilton*, earl of Lanark, writing on 1 February, Vane had returned to the Commons ‘yet seems unsatisfied, notwithstanding that Cromwell bestowed two nights oratory upon him’.396Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 149. Several other commentators claimed that Vane was displeased with his fellow Independent grandees, and the presumption has been that he objected to the Vote of No Addresses that the House had passed in his absence early in January. He would certainly claim after the Restoration that ‘I had neither consent nor vote, at first, in the resolutions of the Houses concerning the non-addresses to his late Majesty’.397Bodl. Clarendon 30, f. 291; Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 156; Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 46; Rowe, Vane, 102; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’. That being so, however, it is curious that he does not seem to have figured in the grandees’ clandestine attempts that spring to reach an accommodation with the king on the basis of the Heads.398Supra, ‘William Pierrepont’. Despite allusions at this time to tension between Vane and his colleagues, he continued to feature on contemporary lists of the Independent leadership at Westminster and, in April, to support Cromwell on the floor of the House.399CJ v. 532a; J. Lilburne, A Whip for the Present House of Lords (1648), 3-4 (E.431.1); Mercurius Elencticus no. 15 (1-8 Mar. 1648), 114 (E.431.15); Westminster Proiects (1648), 1 (E.433.15); Tricks of State (1648), 3 (E.436.3); Windsor Projects (1648), 4 (E.442.10); Westminster Projects (1648), 4 (E.446.5); Rowe, Vane, 102-3. In addition, he was present at the CACP on 7 March, when he almost certainly made common cause with the Independent members – among them his fellow grandees Evelyn and Hesilrige – who had turned out en masse to vote down a motion that would have undermined the appointment of the radical MP Thomas Rainborowe as vice-admiral.400Supra, ‘Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports’; Add. 9305, f. 4.

The failure of the Independent grandees’ secret overtures to Charles forced them to make a u-turn on the Vote of No Addresses if they were to have any hope of retaining control of the City and of frustrating the Scottish Engagers’ invasion plans. On 28 April 1648, therefore, leading Independents in the Commons, including Vane II, voted with the Presbyterians in declaring that the House would not alter ‘the fundamental government … by king, Lords and Commons’ and for re-opening official negotiations with the king on the basis of the Newcastle Propositions.401CJ v. 547a; Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 191. By highlighting their commitment to a traditional settlement on terms approved by both kingdoms, the grandees gave the Engagers’ enemies in Scotland strong grounds to challenge the projected invasion of England. Although Vane apparently needed persuading of the wisdom of this stratagem, he voted with Presbyterians again on 23 May in favour of a personal treaty with Charles.402CJ v. 572b; Clarke Pprs. ii. 17. Vane’s majority tellership on 26 May against demanding that Charles approve the establishment of Presbyterianism not just for three years but for as long as the two Houses should see fit, should properly be read not as resistance to a Presbyterian settlement but an attempt to make Parliament’s peace terms more palatable to the king. This would explain why his fellow teller was the Presbyterian grandee Sir Walter Erle and why one of the opposing tellers was the radical Independent MP Algernon Sydney.403CJ v. 574a; Rowe, Vane, 105. Vane backed the grandees’ efforts that spring and summer to court the City’s Presbyterian leaders and prevent them going over to the Engagers and their royalist allies.404CJ v. 565a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 5 (25 Apr.-2 May 1648), sig. E3 (E.437.31); no. 7 (9-16 May 1648), sig. Gv (E.442.16); Rowe, Vane, 103-4. And in both the House and the DHC – which he attended regularly during the second civil war – he was involved in initiatives for securing London, strengthening the navy and recovering the warships that defected to the king in May.405Supra, ‘Derby House Committee’; CJ v. 505b, 506a, 533b, 537a, 574a, 575b, 577b, 582b, 584b, 610b, 678a, 681a; LJ x. 343b; CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 102, 104, 112-13, 115; Civil War Docs. 1642-8, 343, 346; Rowe, Vane, 105-7.

Vane’s name all but disappears from the Journal between mid-June and mid-August 1648, and he would later claim that Cromwell had been ‘much unsatisfied with his passive and suffering principles’ in the late summer of 1648.406The Proceeds [sic] of the Protector (So Called) and His Council against Sir Henry Vane (1656), 6-7 (E.889.11). The cause of this passivity is not clear, although it had no obvious political source. Anti-army journalists, almost by reflex, lumped him with those at Westminster who were dismayed at the re-opening of negotiations with the king.407Mercurius Melancholicus no. 49 (24-31 July), 296 (E.455.12); The Cuckoo’s-Nest at Westminster (1648), 5, 6 (E.447.19); The Tell Tale Spirit (1648), 4-5; Rowe, Vane, 108-9. But only one pamphleteer referred to a specific incident, possibly in April or May, where Vane had cautioned against a personal treaty – apparently on the grounds that Charles was ‘a perjured man and therefore ought in no case to be trusted’.408Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 16 (11-18 July 1648), sig. Q4 (E.453.11). This somewhat questionable source aside, there is no evidence that Vane spoke out openly against the king or a treaty between May and December. The ominous stirrings in the army at the end of the second civil war helped to convince the Independent grandees of the necessity of treating with the king, and Vane evidently approved this course, for he was appointed early in September to the parliamentary commission for negotiating with Charles at Newport, on the Isle of Wight.409CJ v. 697a; LJ x. 486b, 492b. Hyde, Burnet and other writers have insisted that Vane participated in the Newport negotiations either to frustrate them entirely or to ‘draw out the treaty to a great length’ until the army could be brought up to London to overawe Parliament.410Vox Veritatis, 22-3; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 394, 427, 428; Burnet’s History of My Own Times ed. O. Airy (Oxford, 1897), i. 74-5; Rowe, Vane, 110-11. But for someone supposedly anxious to prolong the treaty it is strange that he apparently contributed relatively little to the formal negotiations (although he signed the commissioners’ letters to Parliament).411Bodl. Tanner 57, ff. 294, 300, 310, 345, 382; Desiderata Curiosa ed. F. Peck (1735), ii. lib. x, 3. References in Cromwell’s correspondence and elsewhere suggest that Vane was playing a more subtle game than mere time-wasting – that is, striving to reach a ‘good peace’ with the king not on the basis of Parliament’s official terms (which demanded the establishment of Presbyterianism) but more along the lines laid out in the Heads of Proposals.412Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 677; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 111-12. Radical supporters of the army certainly believed that Vane was sincere in his desire for some kind of settlement with the king – or, as one of pamphleteer put it, this betrayal of the people ‘into the grand traitor his Majesty’s hands’.413Mercurius Militaris no. 2 (10-17 Oct. 1648), 15.

Vane’s apparent willingness to make one last effort at negotiating a ‘good peace’ with Charles had evaporated by early December 1648. If he had hoped to resuscitate the Heads as a the basis for settlement he had clearly failed. Neither the king nor, it seems, his fellow commissioners had thought it practical to turn the clock back a year. Moreover, like many other Independents, Vane must have been angered by revelations of the king’s bad faith in treating at Newport merely to gain time while the marquess of Ormond united Ireland in his cause. When, on 1 December, the treaty commissioners presented the king’s final answers to the Newport propositions, Vane was ‘very partial in reporting, to the prejudice of his Majesty’.414Bodl. Clarendon 34, f. 8. The debate on the king’s answers resumed the next day (2 Dec.) with a long speech by Vane of the ‘highest insolence and provocation’.415Clarendon, Hist. iv. 461. Those who favoured continuing with the negotiations were in his view royalists in all but name, ‘for, by the debate, we shall soon guess who are our friends and who are our enemies. And to speak more plainly, we shall understand by the carriage of the business who are the king’s party in the House and who for the people’.416Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 37 (5-12 Dec. 1648), sig. Ccc2v (E.476.2). He then proceeded, according to Hyde, to bemoan Parliament’s abandonment of the Vote of No Addresses and its entering into a treaty with a king ‘with whom they had [not] been able to prevail – notwithstanding the low condition he was in – to give them any security, but [he] had still reserved a power in himself, or at least in his posterity, to exercise as tyrannical a government as he had done’ – a reference, in part perhaps, to the king’s dealings with Ormond. Vane concluded by urging Parliament to return to its former resolution of making no addresses to the king and to ‘proceed to the settling government without him’ and to punishing those responsible for fomenting the second civil war. This, he argued, would gratify the army, ‘which had merited so much from them by the Remonstrance which they had so lately published’.417Clarendon, Hist. iv. 461-2. The broad outlines of this speech are confirmed by Ludlowe, though he implied that Vane had also invoked the threat of army intervention, for if MPs voted to accept the king’s answers ‘it would prove but a feather in their caps’. Vane himself can hardly have welcomed the prospect of the soldiers taking matters into their own hands. But he seems to have feared the consequences of further treating with the king even more.418Ludlow, Mems. i. 208.

In the great debate of 4-5 December 1648 on whether to accept the king’s answers at Newport as a basis for settlement, Vane and his father spoke, and probably voted, against the motion.419Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 36-7 (5-12 Dec. 1648), sig. Ccc3 (E.476.2). They were joined by many other Independent MPs but not, it seems, by their fellow grandees. Saye and Fiennes – and probably Pierrepont and Evelyn, too – had decided that a settlement with the king represented a lesser evil than one brokered by the army.420Supra, ‘Nathaniel Fiennes I’; ‘Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire’; ‘William Pierrepont’; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 138. Both Vane and his father survived Pride’s Purge – which Vane II later referred to as ‘the time when that great violation of privileges happened to the Parliament’.421Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 46. The journalist who alleged in January 1649 that Vane had been among those ear-marked for seclusion may well have been confusing him with his father, who was included on at least one contemporary list of the secluded Members.422Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’; The Moderate no. 28 (16-23 Jan. 1649), 269 (E.539.7). Not much more credible are newsbook reports that Vane II was among the 30 or so MPs ‘down-right for the army’ who were present in the House on 11 and 14 December to debate the Remonstrance and vote against the re-admission of the secluded Members ‘against whom there was no charge’.423Mercurius Elencticus no. 55 (5-12 Dec. 1648), 532 (E.476.4); no. 56 (12-19 Dec. 1648), 539 (E.476.36). What is certain is that he played no part in the trial and execution of the king and that he absented himself from Westminster for much of December 1648 and January 1649.

Vane’s career 1640-8: less than the sum of its parts

Vane had established himself by late 1648 as one of the most influential figures in English politics. Yet leaving aside his role in forging the Anglo-Scottish alliance of 1643 and in sustaining it into 1645, his contribution to the success either of Parliament or the Independent faction is not easy to pin down. The claim by one of his biographers that Vane was responsible, as a Parliament-man, for ‘the drafting of many important documents’ does not stand up to scrutiny. It is likely that he had a hand in preparing one of the CBK ordinances, and he was occasionally appointed with other MPs to draft letters to Parliament’s field commanders and its commissioners in Scotland.424Rowe, Vane, 78-9. But though he was regularly named in first place to ad hoc committees, he rarely seems to have chaired them or reported from them. In fact, there is no firm evidence that he drafted a single substantial piece of legislation or major parliamentary declaration – in marked contrast to his close associates St John, Pierrepont and Fiennes. The only document that the House referred specifically to Vane’s care before 1649 was a position paper on its dealings with the comte D’Harcourt in the autumn of 1643.425CJ iii. 316b. This was a month or so after his father had reported, and probably drafted, the ordinance establishing the Committee for the Revenue* – which he then chaired.426Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’. Vane II could boast no such achievements. Perhaps his greatest political skill was as an orator – as he showed to good effect in the debates in December 1644 over the Self-Denying Ordinance.

Although Vane II was almost certainly an influential voice in the Independents’ counsels, there are signs that he was regarded as something of a controversial and potentially wayward figure even within his own faction. This may help to explain why he was not formally involved in the early stages of new modelling – which required tactful handling of the earl of Essex and his adherents – and why he apparently played no part in the Independents’ secret negotiations with the Oxford royalists in 1645 (exposed in the Savile affair) or with Charles early in 1648. Thomas Juxon thought him ‘reserved and will not be taken notice of to do much, and [he] has this faculty – to be irreconcilable where out’.427Juxon Jnl. 94. The editor of the royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus, Marchamont Nedham, writing at the time of the Vote of No Addresses, when Vane was nowhere to be seen, professed that

I know not what to say to him nor where to have him. One that hath plundered Gyges [king of ancient Lydia] of his ring, to make himself invisible on all occasions ... The very flower and cream of knight errantry, that wanders through every faction with his pedlary of all religions.428Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 17 (4-11 Jan. 1648), sig. R3v (E.422.17).

A republican grandee

Vane, by his own admission, was absent from the House for six weeks in the aftermath of Pride’s Purge, ‘to seek, in the clearness of my judgement, as to the trial of the king’.429Burton’s Diary, iii. 174. His claim at his own trial in 1662, that he had absented himself for ten weeks, from 3 December until mid-February, was either an outright lie or a slip of the memory.430Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 46. Having ‘retired himself by scruple of conscience’, he returned to the House – reportedly at the persuasion of Cromwell – on 20 January 1649: the first day of the king’s trial.431The Moderate, no. 28 (16-23 Jan. 1649), 269; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 580; H. Stubbe, A Vindication of…Sir Henry Vane (1659), 7 (E.985.21). Two days later (22 Jan.), he was added to a committee for sending commissioners to the Scottish Parliament to maintain a good correspondency between the two kingdoms, and he was named to a committee on 27 January for prohibiting the proclaiming of any person king without the consent of Parliament.432CJ vi. 122b, 124a. The day of the king’s execution, 30 January, Vane was at Westminster, signing orders of the CNC.433Bodl. Rawl. A.224, f. 8v. He entered his dissent to the 5 December vote – that the king’s answer to the Newport propositions were an acceptable basis for settlement – on 1 February.434[W. Prynne*], A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 23 (E.1013.22).

At his trial in 1662, Vane would defend his participation in the Rump as a conscientious response to a fait accompli.

I conceived it my duty, as the state of things did then appear to me ... to keep my station in Parliament and to perform my allegiance therein to king and kingdom, under the powers then regnant ... yielding obedience to their authority and commands. And having received trust in reference to the safety and preservation of the kingdom, in those times of imminent danger (both within and without), I did conscientiously hold myself obliged to be true and faithful therein.435Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 46.

But his engagement with the Rump was far less disinterested and passive than this description would suggest – and he would later exalt its proceedings over the winter of 1648-9, when, ‘as a seal set to ... their authority, they caused justice to be done upon the late king’.436Proceeds of the Protector, 7. From the very beginning of his participation in the new government he was determined to shape its political culture to his own liking. Elected to the first council of state in February 1649, he was among those councillors who refused to take an oath swearing full approval of the king’s trial and the vote to abolish the House of Lords – but more than that, he later claimed that he ‘would not accept of sitting in the council of state upon those terms but occasioned a new oath to be drawn’, requiring that councillors declare only their willingness to ‘adhere to this present Parliament in the maintenance and defence of the public liberty and freedom of this nation as it is now declared by this Parliament’. Cromwell and Hesilrige were also involved in brokering this compromise, although much of the ill-feeling it generated among the more radical Rumpers such as Ireton and Marten seems to have attached to Vane.437Supra, ‘Henry Ireton’; Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 45, 46; Worden, Rump Parl. 180-1. The misgivings he harboured about the king’s trial and execution did not preclude his nomination to a committee set up on 16 February to prepare a declaration vindicating the Rump’s proceedings since late 1648, and he may have been first named to the 7 March committee on a bill abolishing kingship.438CJ vi. 143b, 158a, 165b. Furthermore, his appointments that autumn indicate that he welcomed the introduction of, and general subscription to, the Engagement.439CJ vi. 307b, 313a, 321b, 326b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 495; Worden, Rump Parl. 219.

By late 1649, Vane had firmly established himself as one of the Rump’s foremost statesmen. Whether he was indeed ‘the most important single member of the Parliament’ is impossible to verify.440Rowe, Vane, 157. But only Hesilrige and Thomas Scot I could have challenged him for this mantle. Not without reason would St John refer (in a letter to Cromwell) to Vane and Hesilrige as the ‘well-head’ of the regime, and it would be alleged in 1659 that Hesilrige had endeavoured in 1652-3 ‘to make himself and Sir Henry Vane the great Hogen-Mogens [the Dutch term of address to their States-General] to rule the commonwealth’.441Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 48; Burton’s Diary, iv. 222; Worden, Rump Parl. 110, 183, 211. Vane was elected to all five of the Rump’s councils of state and was clearly part of what Whitelocke called the ‘juncto’ – the group of leading politicians on the council that shaped government policy.442CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. lxxv; 1650, p. xli; 1651, p. xxxv; 1651-2, p. xlvii; 1652-3, p. xxxiii; Worden, Rump Parl. 183. During the Rump’s first four years in power he made at least 60 reports from the council to the House – the vast majority of which concerned naval administration, the maintenance of the commonwealth’s armies in the three kingdoms, relations with the Scots and the Dutch, and diplomatic affairs generally.443CJ vi. 171b, 176a, 199a, 203a, 209b, 211b, 214a, 244a, 296b, 312a, 315a, 370a, 400b, 412a, 451b, 454a, 466a, 466b, 473a, 487a, 493b, 494a, 520a, 530b, 551a, 568a, 614a, 615a, 615b, 616b, 617a; vii. 7a, 9b, 11b, 13b, 16a, 20b, 23b, 35b, 43a, 51b, 110b, 111a, 135b, 139a, 139b, 140a, 142a, 143a, 185b, 186a, 210b, 211a, 222a, 223a, 240b, 257a, 261a, 261b, 265a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 133, 217, 369, 413; 1650, pp. 101, 273-4, 294, 297, 347, 352, 400, 448, 465; 1651, pp. 33, 240, 264, 274, 390, 396, 422-3, 446, 458; 1651-2, pp. 7, 8, 11, 32, 66, 291, 297, 420, 473, 482, 504, 508; 1652-3, pp. 39, 154, 177-8, 180-1. Much the same picture emerges from his numerous appointments to conciliar committees.444CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 34, 37, 58, 62, 97, 166, 221, 252, 336, 368, 429; 1650, pp. 18, 19, 37, 303; 1651, pp. 11, 66, 68, 235, 450, 477; 1651-2, pp. 11, 43, 46, 67, 436; 1652-3, pp. 2, 9, 62.

In the Rump itself, Vane was named to somewhere between 55 and 138 committees, chairing or reporting from at least eight.445CJ vi. 148b, 209b, 210a, 212a, 228b, 229b, 305b, 344a, 424a, 424b, 438b, 451b, 452a, 465a, 468b, 482b. Unfortunately, the clerk’s continuing sloppiness in distinguishing between Vane and his father again makes it impossible to arrive at a precise tally of appointments for either man. However, the fact that Vane I was named to at least 47 committees suggests that he, too, was an active member of the Rump, and it would therefore be dangerous to assume that the majority of references in the Journals to ‘Sir Henry Vane’ can be assigned to Vane II.446Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’. It is a similar story with regard to Vane II’s tellerships. Between them, the Vanes amassed 65 tellerships in the Rump, of which only 14 can be assigned with certainty to Vane II and nine to Vane I.447Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’; CJ vi. 172b, 453b; vii. 50b, 118b, 134b, 138a, 144a, 144b, 214a, 221b, 235a. The context and subject-matter of many of the remaining 42 divisions point strongly in the direction of Vane II as the likely teller.448CJ vi. 333a, 410b, 440a, 442b, 443a, 469a, 482a, 492b, 511b, 524a, 528b, 529b, 530a, 536a, 549b, 555a, 589b, 592b, 596a, 596b, 599b, 603a, 603b, 604a, 617a; vii. 25a, 112b, 144b, 145a, 188b, 212b, 214a, 260a, 266b, 268a, 273b, 274a. But it is instructive to note that seven of Vane I’s nine tellerships can be identified as such only because Vane II was in Scotland at the time (Dec. 1651-Mar. 1652).449Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’. How many more of Vane I’s appointments in the Rump have been lost in the glare of his son’s dazzling career?

Naval and foreign affairs, 1649-52

The one area of policy where Vane wielded unrivalled influence for much of the Rump’s duration was the management and deployment of the fleet. Yet it is likely that he did not so much achieve greatness in naval administration as have it thrust upon him. The three months after Pride’s Purge saw the exclusion or withdrawal from public life of the men who had dominated naval affairs in the Long Parliament – namely, the earl of Warwick, Alexander Bence, Giles Grene, John Rolle and Samuel Vassall. During the winter of 1648-9 the task of ordering the fleet was divided largely between Warwick and the CNC, which was now in the hands of Miles Corbett, George Thomson and five or six other Rumpers. Following the Rump’s decision in February 1649 to put Warwick’s office as lord admiral in commission, however, the CNC largely returned to dealing with financial matters.450Supra, ‘Committee of Navy and Customs’; Bodl. Rawl. A.224, passim; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. xxi, 9, 10; A. and O. ii. 13-14; W.B. Cogar, ‘The Politics of Naval Administration, 1649-60’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1983), 35. Naval policy-making, strategic oversight and operations now passed to a new conciliar admiralty committee, to which Vane, Valentine Wauton and Alderman Rowland Wilson were named on 12 March, with the addition of four other members over the following few months.451SP25/123, p. 11 and passim; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. xxi, 34 and passim; Rowe, Vane, 159. A month later, Vane and Wauton signed an admiralty committee order for the building of five new frigates, and a year later, when the first two of these ships were launched, Vane ‘sumptuously entertained’ the Speaker, MPs and Fairfax and his officers at Deptford. The new frigates were named the President – after the president of the council of state, John Bradshawe* – and Valiant Fairfax.452SP25/123, p. 35; Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 8.

Vane rapidly emerged as most active member of the council’s admiralty committee – with Wauton a relatively distant second – and by May 1649 the newsbooks were referring to him as the guiding spirit of the Rump’s ‘hogan mogan armado [sic]’.453Mercurius Elencticus (for King Charls II) no. 2 (7-14 May 1649), sig. B3 (E.555.10). In the first two years of the Rump, certainly, he shouldered much of the committee’s workload in managing the fleet, reporting important naval business to the House, liaising between the council and the commanders at sea, and drafting legislation relating to the navy.454CJ vi. 153b, 170a, 171b, 187b, 199a, 202b, 203a, 228b, 229b, 454a, 466a, 466b, 467a, 473a, 493b, 568a; vii. 11b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. xxii, 13-14, 28, 36, 44, 46, 48, 51, 62, 86, 107, 238, 250, 276, 346, 357, 475; Add. 22546, ff. 21, 23, 37, 65; SP25/123, passim; Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS CCLXVI, ff. 20v, 30, 36, 40, 46, 52, 62, 70, 82, 84, 88v, 112, 116, 132v, 162, 171, 173, 177, 193; Belvoir, QZ.29, f. 130; HMC Leyborne-Popham, 22-3, 36-7, 47, 53, 72; Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 8, 40-1; Rowe, Vane, 158-69, 174-5; L.G.C. Laughton, ‘Official ship models’, MM, xiii. 175; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 26-7, 29, 36; W.N. Hammond, ‘The Administration of the English Navy, 1649-60’ (Univ. of British Columbia Ph.D. thesis, 1974), 46-7, 399. He and the admiralty committee were also heavily involved in managing the Rump’s dealings with England’s transatlantic colonies in 1649-50.455CSP Col. 1574-1660, pp. 330-48; A.G. Olson, Anglo-American Politics (1973), 26-9. The interest he took in the exploitation of church lands and sequestration revenues was doubtless related to the large assignments to the navy from these revenue streams.456CJ vi. 312a, 400b, 485a; vii. 115a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 62, 238, 429, 574; 1650, pp. 37, 434, 454, 596; HMC Leyborne-Popham, 22; Rowe, Vane, 177-8. He was a major figure in the House’s and the council’s efforts to manage the excise – much of the proceeds of which were channeled into the navy – and he and Wauton tried in the summer of 1650 to secure the appointment of new excise commissioners to collect this vital duty on internal trade.457CJ vi. 137b, 228b, 229b, 244a, 312a, 325a, 333a, 400b, 412a, 427a, 440a; vii. 50b, 211a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 219; A. and O. ii. 390. Anxious to improve yields by trying to disassociate the excise from any imputation of parliamentary venality, Vane was a minority teller with Sir John Danvers on 18 July against a motion that MPs could also serve as excise commissioners.458CJ vi. 442b, 443a; A. and O. ii. 422.

Vane undoubtedly saw the extension of naval power and the improvement of the nation’s domestic and international trade as interlinked and mutually reinforcing. Evidence of his importance in determining the Rump’s commercial policies is not wanting. However, as it consists overwhelmingly of his appointment to conciliar and Commons committees dealing with mercantile and related issues, it is not, of itself, particularly useful in determining his position on the Rump’s major strategic dilemma of whether to pursue an aggressively commercial, nationalist foreign policy or build godly alliances with the Dutch and other Protestant states.459CJ vi. 216a, 383a, 383b; vii. 119a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 14, 190, 368, 343; 1650, pp. 290, 292; 1651, p. 478; 1651-2, p. 67; A. and O. ii. 403; Worden, Rump Parl. 255-6.

Vane’s influence upon the Rump’s dealings with foreign states, which was apparently considerable, is a little more revealing; he certainly welcomed the prospect of using its burgeoning naval power to overawe France, Spain and the Dutch republic and to ‘play our game the best we can between them … for the interest of England’.460Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 41. To claim that he was the Rump’s de facto ‘foreign secretary’, the ‘dominating influence in foreign policy’, is stretching the available evidence.461Rowe, Vane, 144. But the frequency of his appointment to conciliar and Commons committees to meet and greet, or to treat and communicate with, ambassadors and envoys, clearly put him close to the heart of the Rump’s diplomatic affairs. Similarly, his appointment in March 1649 to the council’s committee ‘to consider what alliances this crown had with foreign states and whether to continue the same and on what terms’, suggests that he was involved, too, in the formulation of foreign policy.

Vane was particularly prominent in the Rump’s increasingly fraught relations with the Dutch republic.462CJ vi. 130a, 209b, 211b, 212a, 296b, 315a, 424a, 424b, 520a, 560a; vii. 135b, 223a, 240b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 37, 133, 145, 147, 166, 300, 329, 369; 1651, pp. 19, 53; SP25/131-3. Buoyed by the English victories on land and at sea during the second half of 1650, he was persuaded that the Rump should not entertain overtures from previously hostile states until they had been made sensible of their ‘error in so rashly engaging against us’.463Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 41; Worden, Rump Parl. 253. It was probably Vane, therefore, rather than his father who was a teller with Sir Henry Mildmay on 19 December 1650 against allowing the Portuguese ambassador to come to London. The two men were defeated, however, by Marten and Ludlowe, who were apparently thinking more about the possible commercial benefits of a rapprochement with Portugal than about forcing foreign states to acknowledge the Rump’s sovereign power.464Supra, ‘Henry Marten’; CJ vi. 511b. One of the Vanes was named in first place to committees set up by the Rump in December 1650 and January 1651 for treating with the Portuguese and Spanish ambassadors and to determine the ‘manner of giving an audience to … ambassadors, agents and other foreign public ministers’.465CJ vi. 516b, 517a, 522b. But although Vane II was clearly exercised by the question of how the Rump should respond to overtures from foreign states, and ‘popish’ ones in particular, it is by no means certain that these were his appointments rather than his father’s. Vane I was a man of vast experience in foreign policy matters and would have made a significant contribution to the Rump’s diplomatic affairs but for his failure to secure a place on the council of state.466Supra, ‘Sir Henry Vane I’. No man at Westminster knew more about Anglo-Dutch relations than Vane I, and it was quite possibly he – rather than Vane II as is generally assumed – who was a teller on 28 January 1651 in favour of sending St John and Walter Strickland* as ambassadors to renegotiate a union with the Dutch republic.467CJ vi. 528b; Rowe, Vane, 145. Nevertheless, Vane II seems to have favoured this mission and to have contributed at Derby House to making the necessary arrangements. His motives for supporting union with the Dutch – England’s greatest maritime rivals – can only be conjectured. But given his godly and millenarian convictions, it is likely that he was influenced less by commercial considerations than the security and eschatological implications of a grand Protestant alliance against popery and the Stuart interest and its foreign backers.468CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 19, 116; Rowe, Vane, 145-6.

The heavy burden of state business Vane II shouldered after 1648, particularly on the admiralty committee, probably influenced his decision in mid-1650 to surrender his office as navy treasurer. He had considered resigning back in 1646 but had evidently thought better of it. Now he had more work on his plate, for which the Rump was proposing to pay him less, having ordered that his salary be fixed at £1,000 a year in lieu of all fees and perquisites. Needless to say, he dressed up his resignation of office as a public-spirited act to improve efficiency and save the commonwealth money. In July 1650, the Rump passed an act by which Vane surrendered his office at the end of the year in return for a grant of former dean and chapter lands in Somerset and Yorkshire worth about £1,200 a year.469CJ v. 30b, 31a; vi. 432b, 440b-441a, 444a; LJ viii. 634; C54/3519/11; C54/3550/4; ADM7/673, p. 510; Rowe, Vane, 131-2, 169-70; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 146; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 54-5. He had yet to relinquish the treasurership, therefore, when there was a division in the House on 10 October over who should succeed him. He and Sydney were minority tellers against appointing Richard Hutchinson, who had served as Vane’s deputy and business manager for much of the previous decade and had continued in that capacity despite Vane securing the appointment of his brother Charles as deputy treasurer early in 1648.470CJ vi. 482a; ADM7/673, pp. 510-11; Rowe, Vane, 137; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 78-9, 247-8; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 53.

There is no evidence that Vane’s enemies in the Rump – notably, Marten and Thomas Chaloner – forced his resignation as navy treasurer or his replacement by Hutchinson.471Worden, Rump Parl. 261, 314. But they may well have helped to block efforts by Vane and others in 1651-2 to reform the Rump’s naval administration. Until late 1651, Vane would be the most assiduous and influential member of the admiralty committee (which was renewed after the election of each successive council).472Bodl. Rawl. A.225-7, passim; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. xxii; 1650, p. 18; 1651, p. 66; 1651-2, pp. 46, 430; 1652-3, p. 2; Rowe, Vane, 166, 271-4. But as the committee acquired more and more members, some of whom knew little of naval affairs, he seems to have become increasingly keen to reform its structure and modus operandi, and he was almost certainly involved in setting up a Commons committee in February 1651 – following the election of a new council – to review ‘the admiralty and affairs of the navy’.473CJ vi. 533b, 534a; Bodl. Clarendon 47, f. 178v; CSP Dom. 1651, p. 44; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 30-1, 32. Chaired by Cornelius Holland, a close friend of the Vane family, this committee reported on 26 June and presented a bill for placing the admiralty’s powers in seven annually-elected commissioners. When the House divided on whether to give this bill a second reading, Vane and Sir Peter Wentworth were tellers in favour, narrowly defeating Harbert Morley (an ally of Chaloner and Marten) and Carew Ralegh. After its second reading the bill was subject to another, even closer, division – this time whether it should be committed. Vane and Denis Bond were tellers for the yeas, in what seems to have been a desperate attempt to save the bill by having it referred to a committee, but they were defeated, and the House voted to continue the council’s admiralty committee.474CJ vi. 592b; Rowe, Vane, 173; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 31. The naval reformers introduced this or similar bills on 26 November 1651 and 10 March 1652, but to no immediate effect.475CJ vii. 43b, 47a, 103b; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 44; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 32, 33.

Vane and Cromwell, 1649-51

Vane was highly visible in the Rump’s herculean efforts to find money and supplies for Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland in 1649 and war against the Scots in 1650-1. In a letter to Thomas Scot I, in December 1650, he expressed the hope that the House would ‘never grudge to take pains’ for their [the soldiers’] supplies, who so happily lay out themselves with such hardships and hazards for us’.476Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 41. This concern almost certainly accounted for his many committee appointments, tellerships and reports from the council of state that related in one way or other to the management and improvement of public revenue, the sale of delinquents’ estates and crown lands and the securing of City loans. During the Scottish campaigns of 1650-1 he was regularly selected by the council of state to report news of the army’s successes and needs to the House. 477CJ vi. 127b, 160b, 172b, 183a, 249b, 258b, 265a, 310a, 312a, 358b, 410b, 494a, 520a, 524a, 530a, 530b, 533b, 536a, 538a, 541b, 555a, 561a, 596b, 614a, 615a, 615b, 616b, 617a; vii. 7a, 9b, 16a, 16b, 20b, 23b, 43a, 46b, 51b, 112a, 138b, 144b, 191b, 210b, 211a, 222a, 222b, 245a, 250b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 243, 336, 511; 1650, pp. 303, 306; 1651, p. 47; 1651-2, p. 482. In August 1650, he chaired a committee to publish letters from Cromwell and his officers, and he was probably the ‘Sir Henry Vane’ named first on 10 September to a three-man committee for preparing a ‘narrative’ of Cromwell’s victory at Dunbar and for drafting an act appointing a day of public thanksgiving for the same.478CJ vi. 451b, 452a, 465a, 468b; Rowe, Vane, 140-1. ‘In the bosom’ of this victory, the act declared, ‘is comprehended the safety of all that hath been fought for these many years last past, and … with this victory God hath renewed being and life itself to this commonwealth and the government thereof’.479Severall Procs. in Parl. no. 51 (12-19 Sept. 1650), 757 (E.780.8). That same day (10 Sept.), Vane wrote to Cromwell, assuring him that the House was

most truly sensible of the wonted favour and loving kindness of our good God and father to the honest and despised army and, in them, to this whole commonwealth ... You may be sure we will not be wanting … to make the best use we can for the good of those that fear God in the land … never were your friends … more enlarged in heart and thankfulness to God and in love to you and your army then from the sense of this late inexpressible deliverance.480Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 19.

Vane’s correspondence with Cromwell reveals the huge contribution he made to the council’s ‘great progress in preparations’ for supplying and deploying the army and militia in response to the Scots’ invasion of England in 1651.481Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 78-9. Following the victory at Worcester in September, Vane, John Lisle and Bulstrode Whitelocke were ordered to prepare instructions for a parliamentary delegation to Cromwell to congratulate and thank him for his ‘prudent and faithful managing and conducting throughout this great and important affair, which the Lord from Heaven hath so signally blessed and crowned with so complete and glorious an issue’. Vane may well have drafted these instructions himself, for it was he who reported them from the council of state on 9 September.482CJ vii. 13a, 13b. Yet although Vane was clearly an important point of contact between Cromwell and the Rump, he was never as intimately associated with the army’s management and triumphs as he was with those of the navy.483Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 17, 43, 48; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 402-3, 411, 412, 428; Rowe, Vane, 148-9.

Scottish and Irish policy, 1649-53

Vane’s considerable experience in the field of Anglo-Scottish relations made him all but indispensable in the Rump’s counsels on Scotland and its dealings with the Covenanters. From early 1649 he was named to conciliar and Commons committees to hold correspondency with the Scots, ‘to consider in what condition we stand in reference to Scotland, either in regard to England or Ireland’, and to defend the Rump’s proceedings in severing the union of crowns and rejecting a covenanted monarchy in the three kingdoms. He apparently endorsed the strategy of a pre-emptive strike against the Scots in 1650, and though he seems to have regretted that ‘this necessitated war between England and Scotland’ he was convinced that the Rump had used ‘all means of Christian love and tenderness towards those that bear the name godly in the Scottish nation’ to avert a conflict. It was with a clear conscience, therefore, that he rejoiced at the ‘mercies and glorious deliverances’ that God vouchsafed the English in Scotland.484CJ vi. 122b, 131b, 214a, 465a, 468b, 517a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 25, 97, 152, 217, 263; 1650, pp. 60, 308, 400; Merc. Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 6 (22-9 May 1649), 47 (E.556.25); Severall Procs. in Parl. no. 51 (12-19 Sept. 1650), pp. 755-9.

The claim that Vane’s influence in the Rump was waning in the year between Dunbar and Worcester must be set alongside his appointment, in first place, to the committee for Scottish and Irish affairs that the council of state established on 1 March 1651. This committee, which Vane reportedly chaired on a regular basis, was entrusted with a wide variety of tasks and became the Rump’s ‘maid of all work’, whether it be supplying its armed forces in all theatres, defraying the council’s expenses, handling conciliar correspondence and the influx of private petitions and propositions, or ordering the nation’s militia.485CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 66-7 and passim; Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 28; Rowe, Vane, 141-2, 143; Worden, Rump Parl. 261.

Vane’s expertise in Anglo-Scottish relations, and what – courtesy of the committee for Scottish and Irish affairs – must surely have been an unrivalled grasp of government business throughout the British Isles, was particularly in demand after Worcester, when the Rump began to consider the problem of how to settle and govern Scotland. On 9 September 1651, one of the Vanes – probably Vane II – was named to a committee to bring in a bill ‘for asserting the rights of the commonwealth to so much of Scotland as lies within its power and how the same may be settled under the government of the commonwealth’.486CJ vii. 14a. The following month, Vane II was appointed to a high-powered parliamentary commission for negotiating a union between England and Scotland.487CJ vii. 30b, 49b, 53a. Major-general John Lambert*, who had been instrumental in the Covenanters’ defeat, has been described as the ‘unofficial head’ of this delegation.488D. Farr, John Lambert, Parliamentary Soldier and Cromwellian Major-General, 1619-84 (Rochester, NY, 2003), 108-9. But although he took an active part in the negotiations, it is unlikely that he carried greater political weight than Vane and St John.489Supra, ‘John Lambert’; Two Declarations…Concerning Scotland (1652), 10-11 (E.659.19); Scotland and the Commonwealth ed. Firth, 30-3; Rowe, Vane, 143. Early in March 1652, Vane, St John and four more of the commissioners (but not Lambert) informed the Rump that most of the Scottish shires and boroughs had accepted its ‘tender of being one commonwealth with England’, and they requested that it swiftly pass legislation ‘that kingly power in Scotland and all laws and oaths relating thereunto be taken away and abolished’ and that MPs ‘would declare their minds as to England and Scotland’s being represented in one Parliament’.490HMC Portland, i. 631-2.

Having returned to London by mid-March 1652 to report on progress, Vane presented a ‘narrative’ of the commissioners’ proceedings to the Rump (16 Mar.), and during the next few weeks he made several reports from the council of concerning the continuing negotiations in Scotland.491CJ vii. 105b, 106a, 107b, 108a, 110b, 111a, 113b; HMC Portland, i. 629. On 18 March, he was named first to a conciliar committee for drafting ‘an act … in reference to the business of Scotland’ – although this seems to have emerged as a declaration, which Vane reported from the council on 25 March, ‘in order to the uniting of Scotland into one commonwealth with England.492CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 185; CJ vii. 110b. Assuming he was primarily responsible for drawing up this declaration, it was perhaps the most important parliamentary document that he is known to have drafted. In it, he described the proposed union not as the creation of a new and greater political entity but as the incorporation of Scotland into the English republic, whereby the Scots could partake of the supposed benefits of ‘the same government that is established here and enjoyed by the good people of this nation, under the free state and commonwealth of England, as now settled without king or House of Lords’.493Two Declarations…Concerning Scotland, 11-16. Vane was subsequently named to a Commons committee on a bill for uniting the two nations in one commonwealth and abolishing the kingly office in Scotland. However, the task of drafting this legislation was probably undertaken by Lisle and Whitelocke.494CJ vii. 118b. Vane was a leading member of the committee that met during October and November 1652 to negotiate with deputies sent from the shires and burghs of Scotland about finalising the terms of the new Anglo-Scottish commonwealth.495CJ vii. 189b, 195b; SP25/138, pp. 3-64 (calendared in CSP Dom. 1651-2; 1652-3). The deputies’ success in securing the retention of Scottish law north of the border would probably have troubled him, although he had apparently ceased to attend the committee before this issue was raised.496A.I. Macinnes, Union and Empire (Cambridge, 2007), 77-8.

Vane’s engagement with the problems that Ireland presented to the Rump, though less intense and wide-ranging than his contribution to Scottish policy, was at times considerable – notably, in raising money for Cromwell’s 1649 invasion and, later, as chairman of the committee for Scottish and Irish affairs.497CJ vi. 183a, 249b, 438a, 541b; vii. 23b, 35b, 45a, 142a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 58, 62, 238, 243; R. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth (Manchester, 1913), i. 22-3. His tellership with Cromwell’s son-in-law Charles Fleetwood* on 21 May 1652 against resuming a debate on Cromwell’s successor as chief officer in Ireland was apparently seen by Lambert as a calculated snub to his ambitions by the lord general and his friends.498Supra, ‘John Lambert’; CJ vii. 134b; TSP vii. 660.

What little attention Vane paid at Westminster to local or municipal interests was confined largely, it seems, to London, Hull, County Durham and his wife’s county, Lincolnshire, where he purchased a sizeable estate in 1650-1 from the royalist compounder Montague Bertie, 2nd earl of Lindsey.499CJ vi. 148b, 227b, 382b, 397b, 438b, 492a, 611b; vii. 137b; CCC 464-5; C54/3589/15; Lincs. RO, 5-ANC/1/2/2; 5-ANC/1/2/3/19, 21; 5-ANC/7/G/25/1; Rowe, Vane, 171-2; Holmes, Lincs. 204. The acquisition of this new family residence, at Belleau in east Lincolnshire, probably accounts for his passing interest in several of the fen drainage disputes that worked their way to Parliament in the early 1650s.500CJ vi. 413b; vii. 118b; Rowe, Vane, 153-4.

Religious policy in the Rump: Zeal Examined, 1650-2

Vane made his most decisive contribution to the Rump’s plans for religious settlement not, it seems, on the floor of the House, or in committee, but as a polemicist. From the spring of 1649 he received a series of nominations to committees for preventing ministers meddling in matters of state, regulating the universities and for maintaining the established ministry – although some of these appointments may have been his father’s.501CJ vi. 175b, 199b, 201a, 263b, 270a, 327b, 359a; vii. 12b, 141a. For an MP committed to complete religious toleration it is interesting to note that on 24 June 1650 he was named first to a committee for suppressing ‘divers atheistical, blasphemous and execrable opinions and unlawful meetings’ associated with the Ranters. He may also have been the ‘Sir Henry Vane’ named in second place to a committee established the following month (19 July) on a bill for punishing those expressing such opinions.502CJ vi. 430b, 444a. However, he was a majority teller on 9 August against several amendments that would have made the provisions of this bill even harsher.503CJ vi. 453b.

Until 1652, Vane seems to have publicly indentified with ‘orthodox’ Independent ministers – in particular, Caryl, Thomas Goodwin and John Owen*. Goodwin and Owen, along with another of Vane’s clerical friends, Philip Nye, would emerge as the principal architects of the Cromwellian religious settlement.504CJ vi. 517a, 529b, 549b; vii. 13a; Oxford DNB, ‘Thomas Goodwin’. Yet on the very day (31 Jan. 1651) that Vane thanked Caryl for a sermon preached before the House, he was a teller first with his friend Thomas Lister and then with Whitelocke in support of the Rumper, anti-Trinitarian and bugbear of the clerical interest, John Fry. The opposing tellers included his old associates Sir William Armyne and Hesilrige. Caryl and his Independent colleagues cannot have approved of Fry’s attacks upon the ‘chaffy and absurd doctrine’ of the Trinity, which he saw merely as ‘a device to increase the power of the clerics’.505CJ vi. 529b; S. Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2010), 164-5.

Vane followed Fry during the second half of 1651 in writing a defence of toleration and the tenets that he thought underpinned it. He published this work anonymously in June 1652 under the title Zeal Examined, although his authorship was sufficiently well known to elicit a sonnet to him by John Milton, praising his ‘sage counsel’ and wisdom in understanding ‘both spiritual power and civil, what each means, what severs each’. Zeal Examined – his first major foray into print – was published as part of a campaign masterminded by Vane’s friend Roger Williams (who was staying, or at least collaborating, with Vane in London during the early months of 1652) against the initiative of Owen and his ministerial allies, as laid out in The Humble Proposals of February 1652, to establish the doctrinal foundations of a public church.506Roger Williams Lttrs. ed. Bartlett, 234; Corresp. of Roger Williams ed. G.W. LaFantasie (Hanover, NH, 1988), 355, 362. Contrary to the Independent ministers’ assumption that the magistrate had a right and duty to exercise authority in religious affairs, Vane argued for the separation of church and state. His case rested on the observation that because men’s natural knowledge of God was so slender it was impossible to distinguish the regenerate ‘true Saint’ from the unregenerate and, therefore, to define idolatry and hence the true bounds of religious orthodoxy. Moreover, because God’s spirit entered the soul by ‘several degrees, it becomes incompetent [i.e. incompatible] with any outward rule of the magistrate, who can neither know those degrees nor make one rule for all men that are under several measures of the discovery of God at the same time’. To coerce men’s consciences in the name of true religion was to arrogate a power that properly belonged to God alone. Extensive toleration was the only logical alternative to an endless cycle of unjustifiable persecution. Once again, therefore, Vane was arguing for freedom of religious expression not as a good in itself but as the best means to allow ‘the great design of God, both in the inward and outward world’, to reach fruition.507Zeal Examined: or a Discourse for Liberty of Conscience in Matters of Religion (1652), 9-11, 32 and passim (E.667.15); Parnham, Vane, 25-6, 278-9; Parnham, ‘Reconfiguring mercy and justice’, 81; Parnham, ‘Nurturing of righteousness’, 8-9; Mortimer, Reason and Religion, 198, 200, 201-2; C. Polizzotto, ‘The campaign against The Humble Proposals of 1652’, JEH xxxviii. 578-9; McDermott, ‘Vane’, 255-9. ‘All that the Lord requires of the magistrate’, he insisted, ‘is but to let the light come forth upon equal terms with the darkness, for then it will certainly overcome’.508Zeal Examined, 23.

At one point in Zeal Examined, Vane acknowledged that several of those ‘worthies who have been instrumental towards the destruction of Babylon in our scene’ had taught him ‘much of that Gospel truth which I have received’ and that he owed ‘special deliverance from a strong piece of bondage, by that light which came not long since from that hand which the Lord hath made most eminent in delivering us from our outward enemies’.509Zeal Examined, 27. This can only be a reference to Cromwell, who had evidently helped to ease Vane’s conscience on a major point at issue in the recent past – perhaps with respect to serving in the Rump and abandoning any lingering loyalty Vane may have felt towards the monarchy and the old constitutional order. Yet although Cromwell, like Vane, was an anti-formalist who favoured liberty of conscience, he was more respectful of the established ministry, and he accepted the view that magistrates were obliged to protect orthodox ‘core beliefs’, such as the Trinity, and to punish blasphemers and heretics. Cromwell, it has been argued, ‘never wanted to divorce church from state’. Vane’s willingness to tolerate the Ranters on the grounds that their ‘false, fleshly liberty might possibly be a forerunner of some true spiritual liberty, to break forth in an extraordinary manner’, would doubtless have appalled him.510Zeal Examined, 33; B. Worden, ‘John Milton and Oliver Cromwell’, in Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution ed. I. Gentles, J. Morrill, B. Worden (Cambridge, 1998), 246; Parnham, ‘Nurturing of righteousness’, 2; Oxford DNB, ‘Oliver Cromwell’. Nor would Cromwell and his clerical friends have approved of Vane’s support in 1652 for authors who attacked the Calvinist doctrine of atonement.511‘Hutchinson pprs.’ (Collns. Mass. Hist. Soc. ser. 3, i), 35-7; H.J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (1951), 234-9. Vane concluded, charitably if also condescendingly, that his own understanding of ‘the wonderful appearances of God in these times’ – which he thought operated through ‘episodic dispensations of “new light”’ – had been too deep for Cromwell to fathom.512Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 79; Parnham, ‘Nurturing of righteousness’, 10.

Two weeks before the publication of Zeal Examined, Vane underlined his commitment to liberty of conscience in striking fashion when, on 1 June 1652, he was twice a majority teller with Marten in favour of retaining a clause in a declaration concerning Ireland to the effect that it was not Parliament’s intention to compel Irish Catholics to attend Protestant services ‘contrary to their consciences’. The opposing tellers included the godly figures of Sir William Masham and Philip Skippon. After winning these votes, Vane may not have been unduly dismayed when the House then resolved to add a proviso to the clause, stipulating ‘that this doth not extend to the allowance of the exercise of the popish religion in Ireland in any kind; nor to give any colour or countenance thereunto, nor to the least toleration thereof’.513CJ vii. 138a. Vane acknowledged that Catholics might have ‘the good seed ruling in their hearts’, just as some Protestants ‘may be governed by the seed of the serpent’. Nevertheless, he did not share Williams’s readiness to extend full toleration to Catholics. ‘I do not intend a necessary toleration of papists’, he explained in Zeal Examined, ‘much less of priests and Jesuits’. However, he was careful to make clear that he denied toleration to Catholics not because of their practices or beliefs but because they maintained ‘the jurisdiction of a foreign power over their consciences’. To Vane, Catholics were ‘a threat to toleration itself and the long-term security of English Protestant liberty. They were subversive and inherently intolerant’.514Zeal Examined, sigs. A2, A3v, 30; Parnham, ‘Nurturing of righteousness’, 19; J. Fradkin, ‘Religious Toleration and Protestant Expansion in Revolutionary England, 1642-58’ (Johns Hopkins Univ Ph.D. thesis, 2019), 166-8.

Vane’s enemies as a Rumper

Vane’s willingness to indulge those whose opinions differed from his own did not extend to his political opponents. He was reputedly no friend of the Leveller leader (and fierce critic of Vane I) John Lilburne and nor, it seems, of the Levellers’ programme of social and political reform.515Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 47 (19-26 Mar. 1650), sig. Aaa2v (E.596.12); Rowe, Vane, 156. Despite his high profile in the Rump, Vane was named to relatively few committees for the relief of the poor and legal reform – and some of these appointments may again have been Vane I’s.516CJ vi. 262a, 319b, 330b, 374b, 432b, 488a; vii. 107b, 215a, 253b. He certainly disapproved of those in the Rump who generally championed such causes, speaking disparagingly of ‘Tom Chaloner, Harry Neville and those wits’ and their fondness for ‘potting’ (drinking).517Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 43. His tellerships in the Rump likewise suggest that his relations with another leading member of that dissolute ‘gang’, Henry Marten, were not harmonious – despite their shared commitment to religious toleration.518Rowe, Vane, 153-5, 156.

Although Vane had been keen to protect his Presbyterian friend Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham from the wrath of the Independents in September 1647, he was apparently less forgiving of the Rump’s royalist and Presbyterian enemies.519Whitelocke, Diary, 199. His tough line against ‘malignants’ was perhaps a reaction to his fear for the fledgling Rump’s survival. With a royalist-Presbyterian axis beginning to take shape early in 1650, he expressed the view in private that

they were in a far worse estate than ever they have yet been; that all the world was and would be their enemies; that the Scots had left them; that their own army and general [Fairfax] were not to be trusted; that the whole kingdom would rise and cut their throats upon the first good occasion; and that they knew not any place to go unto to be safe.520Charles the Second and Scotland ed. S.R. Gardiner (Scottish Hist. Soc. xvii), 98; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 155; Worden, Rump Parl. 222.

Victory at Dunbar in September 1650 foiled what Vane saw as a vast plot to bring down the Rump,

whose total ruin and subversion was not only contrived and designed but almost ripened unto an accomplishment by all the enemies of it, under the fairest vizards and disguises they could clothe themselves with – that is to say, of the cause of God, the Covenant and the privileges of Parliament – the more easily to seduce and deceive a party within this nation.521Severall Procs. in Parl. no. 51 (12-19 Sept. 1650), 757.

If Vane took sides thereafter on matters at Westminster concerning the treatment of malignants and other perceived transgressors it was not always with those pleading leniency and forgiveness – a group that generally included Cromwell and other senior army officers.522CJ vii. 144a, 212b, 214a, 221b; Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 46 (12-19 Mar. 1650), sigs. ZZv, ZZ2 (E.595.8); Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 27-8. Thus Vane was a teller with Thomas Chaloner on 3 July 1651 in favour of resuming consideration of whether William Craven, 1st Baron Craven’s name should be inserted in the bill for the sale of delinquents’ estates – this was after the Committee for Compounding had informed the House that it doubted ‘whether the Parliament has made it a matter for sequestration for any person living beyond the seas [as Craven did] to hold correspondency with, or repair to the person of, the now king of the Scots’.523CJ vi. 545, 596a.

Vane I’s absence from the House during the early summer of 1651 confirms recent assumptions that it was Vane II who served as teller in a series of divisions in mid-July in favour of imposing a swift and fatal punishment upon the Presbyterian minister and conspirator Christopher Love.524CJ vi. 599b, 603a, 603b, 604a; Recs. of the Cttees. for Compounding...in Durham and Northumb. ed. R. Welford (Surt. Soc. cxi), 59; Rowe, Vane, 155-6; Worden, Rump Parl. 247. The evidence against Love confirmed Vane in his opinion (as he informed Cromwell) that England’s Presbyterian ministers

do still retain their old leaven and are not ingenious at all towards us, whatever they pretend, but have dexterity enough to take us on our weak side...and gain time while this decisive work in Scotland be over. For it is plain unto me that they do not judge us a lawful magistracy nor esteem anything treason that is acted by them to destroy us in order to bring the king of Scots as head of the Covenant.

Vane warned Cromwell that the Presbyterians aimed to sow division among the Rump’s leaders, and he looked to him for ‘clemency and favour ... to balance your brother Heron [Vane], who is taken for a back friend [enemy] to the black coats [the ministry]’.525Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 84; Worden, Rump Parl. 244-5.

Vane, Cromwell and the Anglo-Dutch war, 1652-3

Although Vane and Cromwell were moving apart by mid-1652 over the issues of religious toleration and the treatment of malignants, they remained in step in their commitment to a foreign policy that prioritised the Protestant cause over the advancement of English commerce and maritime power.526[Sikes], Sir Henry Vane, 96; M. Guizot, Hist. of Oliver Cromwell and the English Commonwealth (1854), i. 468; Gardiner, Hist. Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii. 172-3; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 568; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 102-3. On 10 April 1652, Vane and another godly Rumper, Sir William Masham, were added to the council committee to meet with the Dutch ambassadors – very likely to give a more conciliatory aspect to the Rump’s negotiations with the United Provinces.527CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 205. But from 14 April until mid-May, Vane ceased to attend the council and his name disappears from the Journals. His absence at this critical juncture is hard to explain – unless it was then that he embarked upon the mission very sketchily noticed in the memoirs of the French statesman and supporter of the Fronde, Cardinal de Retz. At some point in the early 1650s – the cardinal gives no precise date – Vane arrived in Paris with letters of credence from Cromwell, which he embroidered with ‘all the courtesies, all the offers and all the temptations you can imagine’. It seems that Cromwell and his friends were exploring the possibility of some kind of league with the leaders of the Fronde, in common defence of ‘public liberty’.528Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 525; Rowe, Vane, 147-8. Since the early seventeenth century, English overtures to the French had usually been associated with an anti-Spanish, pro-Dutch foreign policy line; although by 1651 the leader of the French rebels, the Prince de Condé, was actually in league with Spain.529CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 205. Whatever the timing and purpose of Vane’s secret embassy to Paris, it is further evidence that he was – as de Retz was informed – Cromwell’s ‘intimate confidant’.530Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 525.

Vane had returned to Westminster by mid-May 1652 and was soon immersed in formulating the Rump’s response to the outbreak of naval hostilities with the Dutch. By early June, he was closely involved in the council’s negotiations with the Dutch ambassadors and probably shared their desire to prevent a full-scale war between the two states.531CJ vii. 135b-136a, 139b, 140a, 143a; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 278, 297; Rowe, Vane, 175-6. Defeated by the advocates of war at Derby House, Vane hit back on 24 June, when he was a majority teller for rejecting a stiffly-worded message to the ambassadors that the council had ordered to be prepared by Marten, Scot and John Bradshawe.532CJ vii. 145a; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 298; Rowe, Vane, pp. 154-5; Worden, Rump Parl. 301-2. Between late June and early September, however, he ceased to attend the House, the council or its committees for the admiralty and foreign affairs.533SP25/131, pp. 8, 27; Bodl. Rawl. A.226, ff. 152-217; Rowe, Vane, p. 147; Worden, Rump Parl. 302. That Vane should take two months absence at a time of considerable agitation in the Rump’s affairs is remarkable. It was either now that he undertook his mission to Paris – a dangerous journey given the strong Dutch naval presence in the Channel – or, perhaps more likely, he withdrew from the Rump in protest at the outbreak of war with the Dutch.534Rowe, Vane, pp. 147-8.

Vane resumed attendance at the council and the admiralty and foreign affairs committees on 9-10 September 1652, and within a few weeks he had rejoined the campaign for an overhaul of naval administration. The central objective here was to transfer control of fleet operations from the admiralty committee – where the Chaloner-Marten anti-Dutch faction had been strongly represented since late 1651 – to a ‘small number ... that understood their work’.535Supra, ‘Richard Salwey’; SP25/131, p. 27; Bodl. Clarendon 47, f. 281; Rawl. A.226, f. 194v; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. xliv, 423-4; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 101, 142. Following a report from the council by Vane’s ally Richard Salwey on 1 October for reform of the ‘executory part of the admiralty’, Vane was a minority teller for empowering the CNC to report a bill that had been referred to it in March for reviving the scheme to vest the powers of the admiralty committee in a commission of non-MPs.536CJ vii. 103b, 188a, 188b; Rowe, Vane, 176-7. Four days later (5 Oct.), the council appointed Vane, Colonel John Dixwell and John Lisle as commissioners to attend General Robert Blake* ‘to confer with him about disposing the fleet’ according to instructions prepared by the council committee for foreign affairs.537CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 430; Rowe, Vane, 177. Anti-war sentiment figured prominently in the elections to the new council of state on 24-5 November, which saw the removal of Marten, Henry Neville and several other leading advocates of war with the Dutch. Vane, Whitelocke and other anti-war figures were convincingly re-elected. At a stroke, the Chaloner-Marten group’s influence on the admiralty and foreign affairs committees was undermined – and was then all but destroyed by the Dutch naval victory at Dungeness on 30 November.538SP25/132; Worden, Rump Parl. 313-14; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 112-13.

Opposition to reforming the admiralty had been swept aside, but it was now recognised that successful peace negotiations could be conducted only after England had regained the upper hand at sea, and ‘therefore the new council, chosen for peace, had to push for war in the short term even more vigorously than its predecessor’.539Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 16. On 4 December 1652, the Rump resolved that the ‘directive power’ of the admiralty be vested in a six-man commission headed by four MPs, among them Vane and Salwey, and on 10 December, Whitelocke reported a bill to this effect, which was duly passed.540CJ vii. 225b, 228a. It was Vane who took the leading and most active role on this new body, showing ‘such care and diligence in the discharge of this trust that the face of affairs was soon altered’.541CJ vii. 246a, 256a, 257a, 261a, 261b, 265a; SP18/45-50, passim; Bodl. Rawl. A.227, ff. 1-69v; [Sikes], Sir Henry Vane, 97; Ludlow, Mems. i. 337; Rowe, Vane, 180, 183-4, 187; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 117. In short order the admiralty commissioners conducted a thorough an overhaul of the fleet and effected an ‘unprecedented mobilisation’ of the nation’s maritime resources. Their unwearying efforts to provide men, money and godly, well-affected officers for the fleet contributed considerably to Blake’s victory over the Dutch at Portland Bill in February 1653. The management of the fleet would remain in the admiralty commission’s hands until the Restoration.542Bodl. Clarendon 47, ff. 281v-283; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 118-32; Rowe, Vane, 180-8. Despite this turnaround in English military fortunes, there is evidence that Vane and Cromwell worked together during the early months of 1653 in an attempt to secure a swift resolution of the war, although without success.543CJ vii. 266b; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 178; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 556, 623.

The fall of the Rump, 1652-3

The most important context for understanding Vane’s relations with Cromwell under the Rump is the debate among its leaders concerning the regime’s legitimacy and what should replace it. After their victory at Worcester in September 1651, Cromwell and the army grew increasingly impatient for the Rump to make provisions for fresh parliamentary elections and then to dissolve itself.544Oxford DNB, ‘Oliver Cromwell’. Vane had assumed a major role in the Rump’s deliberations on these issues with his appointment in May 1649 as chair of a committee to consider ‘the settling of the succession of future Parliaments and regulating their elections’.545CJ vi. 210a, 305b; Worden, Rump Parl. 219. On 9 January 1650, he reported the committee’s proposals for a new representative, which included a redistribution of parliamentary constituencies based on the several such schemes mooted since the Heads of Proposals. However, the committee had apparently been unable to agree on the nature of the franchise, the qualifications for either MPs or voters, the status of the boroughs in relations to the county constituencies and the duration of future Parliaments. These crucial questions were left to the House’s determination. More controversially still, the committee recommended that ‘those Members now sitting in Parliament’ should retain their seats and, therefore, that the Rump should be recruited rather than dissolved and a new Parliament called.546CJ vi. 344a-345b; HMC Hodgkin, 47; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 287-8.

In his letter to Cromwell shortly after Dunbar, Vane tried to interest him in the idea that the Rump’s aims were generally good ‘and are capable of improvement upon such wonderful deliverances as these vouchsafed to them [Dunbar]’.547Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 19. A year later, however, and Vane himself was complaining to Cromwell that the Rump’s leadership included those who ‘without continual contestation and brabbling...will not suffer to be done things that are so plain as that they ought to do themselves’.548Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 78. This was perhaps a veiled reference to Marten’s ‘gang’ or, possibly, to Hesilrige and his allies, with whom Vane had clashed several times in the year since Dunbar.549Worden, Rump Parl. 261. He asked Cromwell, for the sake of their ‘ancient friendship ... not to give ear to the mistakes, surmises or jealousies of others ... concerning your brother Heron [Vane], but to be assured he answers your heart’s desire in all things’.550Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 78-9. He anticipated ‘greater trials and difficulties then ever about the right way of settling’ the Rump’s future, and on 25 September 1651 he was proved correct, for that day Cromwell and Scot were majority tellers in favour of bringing in a bill ‘for setting a time certain for the sitting of this Parliament and for calling a new Parliament’ – in other words, for jettisoning the recruiter scheme that Vane had reported in January 1650.551Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 79; CJ vii. 20b; Worden, Rump Parl. 266. A committee was then established to bring in the necessary bill, and the next day (26 Sept.) both Vane and Cromwell were among a small group of additional nominees.552CJ vii. 20b. Vane’s appointment to this committee may not necessarily register approval of the decision to jettison recruiter elections, but nor is there any firm evidence that his advocacy of recruiting was sustained after Worcester.553Rowe, Vane, 150-1; Worden, Rump Parl. 367.

In Zeal Examined, which Vane wrote in the mid-to-late 1651, he conceded that ‘free and frequent popular elections’ were to be preferred, but he added that this would be ‘hardly practicable in any ingenious way till the people be taught by experience the benefit of mutual forbearance in matters of religion’.554Zeal Examined, 44-5. Was this an endorsement of the Rump’s decision in November 1651 to authorise its sitting until November 1654 – thus giving it sufficient time to ‘take root in the interests of men’?555Worden, Rump Parl. 267, 289. Did his reference to the difficulty of holding free and frequent elections ‘in any ingenious [i.e. ingenuous] way’ altogether rule out an early end to the Rump and the electing of a ‘new representative’ or, indeed, to the imposition of strict qualifications on the electorate in order to secure the return of men ‘pious and faithful to the interest of the commonwealth’?

By the summer of 1652, a vocal section of the army was pushing for the Rump to dissolve itself sooner rather than later and for the holding of fresh elections. At this stage, however, Cromwell was against applying overt pressure on the Rump to set an earlier date for its dissolution. Moreover, he shared the apprehensions of other Rumpers as to the dangers inherent in ‘free’ elections on a broad franchise. His increasing willingness to consider a settlement ‘with somewhat of monarchical power in it’ would not have found much favour with Vane.556Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 41-2, 46; Oxford DNB, ‘Oliver Cromwell’. Even so, the two men remained on close enough terms to serve together as tellers on 10 March 1653 in a division concerning the Dutch war – which they both disliked.557CJ vii. 266b. Ten days later (30 Mar.), in a debate on the much wrangled over bill for a new representative, Vane was a minority teller with Bond against a motion that the franchise in future elections should be restricted to the owners of a real or personal estate worth £200 or more.558CJ vii. 273b. That one of the winning tellers was Sir Arthur Hesilrige may be significant, for just a few days later Roger Williams, who was staying with Vane’s wife at Belleau, would claim that Hesilrige, George Fenwick ‘and all the friends they can make in Parliament and council, and all the priests, both Presbyterian and Independent’, were gearing up to oppose Vane and his supporters over the issue of toleration and the renewal of the Rhode Island charter. This quarrel was complicated, as Williams recognised, by what he termed the ‘great thoughts and preparation [at Westminster] for a new Parliament’. As he informed his colleagues in Rhode Island, some of their friends in England – and it would be interesting to know whether he was including Vane here – were ‘apt to think another Parliament will more favour us and our cause than this has done’.559Roger Williams Lttrs. ed. Bartlett, 253-5.

Cromwell’s patience with the Rump seems to have dissipated before his trust in Vane did. By 19 April, he and the council of officers had resolved to dissolve the House, preferably with its own consent, and to establish an interim government ‘till another representative shall be chosen’. That day (19 Apr.), they held talks with 20 or so leading Rumpers – Vane almost certainly included – at which Cromwell received what he thought were assurances from ‘two or three of the chief ones, [indeed] the very chiefest of them [?Vane]’ that they would persuade the House to suspend further debate on the bill for a new representative pending further discussion by the council of officers concerning the interim nominated government. Not surprisingly, the Rump perceived this resolution as an ultimatum and attempted to rush through the bill the next day (20 Apr.) in an amended form (or so it has been conjectured) in order to perpetuate itself until at least November and to allow for the manipulation of the subsequent elections in such a way as would undermine the interests of the army and the Saints.560Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 64-5, 68-102.

If Cromwell had indeed relied on Vane above all to halt proceedings on the bill it would help to explain why he singled him out for particular reproach after entering the House with a file of musketeers on 20 April 1653 and dissolving the Rump. In Algernon Sydney’s account of the Rump’s demise, Cromwell told Vane as they left the House ‘that he [Vane] might have prevented this extraordinary course, but he was a juggler and had not so much as common honesty’.561Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 642; Ludlow, Mems. i. 353; Worden, Rump Parl. 335-6, 337. Cromwell’s anger here perhaps registered awareness of his own foolishness in believing that Vane or other ‘chief’ Rumpers possessed the necessary authority to effect a swift compliance with the army’s wishes. For even supposing that Vane had tried his hardest to do Cromwell’s bidding on 20 April, it is very unlikely that he could have won the House over in the matter of just a few hours – not least because those leading the charge to push the bill through included the immensely influential Hesilrige.562Supra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; Worden, Rump Parl. 337-8; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’.

Vane attended his last meeting of the admiralty commission on 19 April 1653, and on 22 April it was reported that he had ‘gone to the country’.563SP18/51/4, f. 8; Bodl. Rawl. A.227, ff. 69v-70; Rowe, Vane, 189-90. According to one commentator, Vane withdrew to Raby Castle and Hesilrige to Newcastle, but not before Cromwell had assured them ‘that there would be a time to call them to an account ... that their faces and crimes were so well known that there was no port in England whereat they could escape’.564Add. 78221, f. 61v. Though Vane would return to Westminster in future years, his ‘ancient friendship’ with Cromwell would never recover from the events of 20 April.

Private and retired, 1653-5: Meditations

Vane spent much of the next three years at Belleau and (after his father’s death in May 1655) Raby Castle in a ‘private and retired condition’.565Roger Williams Lttrs. ed. Bartlett, 257. Reports that Lambert was opposed to Vane’s re-admittance to power are difficult to reconcile with the claim made by a royalist newswriter in June 1653 that Vane had been offered a seat in the Nominated Parliament by the council of officers. He had replied, or so it was reported,

by a letter extracted out of that part of the Apocalypse [the Book of Revelation], wherein the reign of the Saints is mentioned, which he sayeth he believes will now begin. But for his part he is willing to defer his share in it until he come to heaven and desired to be excused.566CCSP ii. 206; TSP i. 265-6.

The newswriter’s belief that ‘upon little entreaty’ Vane would accept a seat proved unfounded. A year later, at the time of the elections to the first protectoral Parliament, Williams claimed that Vane was ‘daily missed’ at Whitehall ‘and courted for his assistance’.567Roger Williams Lttrs. ed. Bartlett, 260. Rumours that he had been returned for Lincolnshire and other constituencies, although unfounded, suggest that he remained a figure of public interest.568CSP Dom. 1654, p. 286; Clarke Pprs. v. 193.

In fact, as Vane’s correspondence in 1653-4 with the godly Lincolnshire gentleman Richard Cust* reveals, he had reverted to the ‘passive and suffering principles’ – of ‘seeking God and waiting only upon Him’ – that he had adopted during the late summer of 1648.569Proceeds of the Protector, 6-7; E.C. Cust, Recs. of the Cust Fam. (1898-1927), i. 217. He had little faith that the Nominated Parliament presented a step ‘Zionwards ... or whether we be going back to the city spiritually called Sodom and Egypt’, and he denounced what he saw as the Fifth Monarchists’ expectation that the coming of Christ’s kingdom would ‘settle them in ... worldly glory, light and power. For the day of the Lord will be darkness and not light’, bringing judgment on the ‘hypocrites in Zion’. The establishment of the protectorate late in 1653 reinforced his determination to prostrate himself before providence. God, he pronounced, was withdrawing ‘more and more from all worldly concerns, as well in government as other things, and making them [His people] to look for protection only in and by Himself’. Cust seems to have shared Vane’s opinions ‘as well in the things of Christ as of the present transactions [of state]’ and was instrumental in warding off a ‘thrust’ at Vane in the autumn of 1653 – possibly an attempt to have him pricked for sheriff of Lincolnshire.570Cust, Cust Fam. i. 217-18.

Vane’s withdrawal from public affairs to ‘enjoy a retiredness under the immediate teachings of God’s spirit’ afforded him more time for what he called a ‘family-way of religion and worship’, in which he and his household eschewed public church services for private religious exercises.571H. Stubbe, Malice Rebuked, or a Character of Mr Richard Baxters Abilities (1659), 55 (E.1841.2); [Sikes], Sir Henry Vane, 50-1, 156; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’. Vane not only led the family prayers but also delivered sermons, speaking ‘clearly, soundly and discriminatively in the principles of the “new-creature” (or regeneration) from the common mistakes of men that rest in a mere reformation [and] outward purification’. The Fifth Monarchist writer John Rogers (not to be confused with the Vanes’ clergyman friend of that name), who shared prison-time with Vane in 1656, would insist that Vane and his family were the most godly of ‘any that I know in the world of that quality’, and he likened their company to that of ‘a church, a court and a university of the highest, best and most liberal sciences that appertain to men or to Christians’.572V. and A. Forster ms 48 D.41; J. Rogers, Diapoliteia (1659), 21, 22 (E.995.25).

The most substantial work to emerge from Vane’s disengagement with public affairs in the mid-1650s was his The Retired Mans Meditations, or the Mysterie and Power of Godlines, which was published under his own name in the summer of 1655.573Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations. This lengthy and often ‘knotty and abstruse’ exposition of Vane’s spiritual gleanings was, and has remained, ‘more often a cause of perplexity than a source of inspiration’.574Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations, preface; Parnham, Vane, 11; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’. Later sections of the Meditations, however, address more contemporary issues, and are somewhat more accessible. Here, Vane sought answers to the questions that he had asked of his godly friends in Rhode Island early in 1654: ‘Are there no wise men amongst you? No public self-denying spirits that at least, upon the grounds of public safety, equity and prudence, can find out some way or means of union and reconciliation for you amongst yourselves, before you become a prey to common enemies?’575Roger Williams Lttrs. ed. Bartlett, 257. These questions had probably assumed even greater relevance for Vane following the first protectoral Parliament’s attempt to lay the groundwork of public conformity to ‘the fundamental principles of doctrine’ and generally to narrow the scope allowed for liberty of conscience. Despite such threats to freedom of religious expression, Vane concluded that the Saints should not demand power solely for themselves, as the Fifth Monarchists advocated. No one group was capable of realising God’s millennial design, he argued. Instead, ‘true Saints’ should cooperate with ‘natural men’ and the outwardly godly – ‘men in a state of fleshly saint-ship’ – ‘for the heightening of a civil magistracy into a suitableness unto the divine service of this worldly sanctuary’.576Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations, 154, 184, 190, 387, 388, 393; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’. The ‘rule of magistracy ... is not to intrude itself into the office and proper concerns of Christ’s inward government and rule in the conscience ... but is to content itself with the outward man’.577Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations, 388. Magistrates must be ‘watchful in not suffering anything to be done by them that may carry in it hindrance or opposition to the breaking in of higher discoveries ... Upon such grounds, magistracy may be preserved in its lawful use and exercise as a faithful servant waiting for the coming of his Lord’.578Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations, 391.

Vane did not mention Cromwell or the protectorate by name in the Meditations. But it is possible that he already identified the protector with the ‘second beast’ in the Book of Revelation: 13, whose role it was (according to Vane)

to make war with the true Saints ... and to wear them out with his cruelty and rage, pretending to visible saintship himself and by the power of his rule and government in the magistracy ... to give laws and rules in God’s worship, under colour of warrant from the Scriptures, making himself umpire of all controversies in matters of religion and declarer of heresies, blasphemies and the like.579Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations, 369; Parnham, ‘Nurturing of righteousness’, 10-11, 33.

In December 1655, Vane would declare himself ‘the same as ever ... in true friendship’ to Cromwell.580TSP iv. 329. Yet in the Meditations, or so it seems, and in subsequent publications, he developed a perception of Cromwell as an instrument of the Devil, masquerading as a ‘visible Saint’ in order to deceive the credulous; a tyrant who sought to reprise Charles I’s absolutist design by casting ‘into obloquy and disgrace all those that desired to preserve the laws and liberties of the nation, and to maintain religion in the power of it, under the names of puritans, factious and seditious persons’.581Vane, A Healing Question Propounded and Resolved (1656), 16-17 (E.879.5); Proceeds of the Protector, 3; Parnham, Vane, 114-15; Parnham, ‘Politics spun out of theology’, 55, 59.

Vane sympathised with the Quakers not only as fellow victims of Cromwellian authoritarianism but also as representatives of the ‘natural conscience’ of unregenerate man, whom Christ had not left ‘without a witness of God ... to bring them unto life and to the knowledge of the truth’.582Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations, 184, 211; Parnham, Vane, 81-2; Parnham, ‘Nurturing of righteousness’, 21-3. During the mid-1650s, he established friendly contacts with some of the leading Quakers in County Durham and in Bristol, where the town corporation had appointed him high steward in March 1651 and had entertained him on several occasions in 1653-5.583Supra, ‘Bristol’; Bristol RO, 04026/24, pp. 149, 230, 239; Mayers, 1659, 66-7; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’. But a meeting with George Fox at Raby Castle in 1657 did not go well. ‘Thou hast known something formerly’, Fox supposedly told Vane, ‘but now there is a mountain of earth and imaginations up in thee, and from that rises a smoke which has darkened thy brain’. Vane apparently regarded Fox as a ‘mad man’, while Fox thought Vane ‘high and proud and conceited ... he could hardly bear Friends without they would put off their hats to him’.584Jnl. of George Fox, i. 312-14.

Return to the fray, 1656-8: A Healing Question

In his best-selling pamphlet A Healing Question, published in May 1656, Vane revised and broadened his thesis in Meditations.585Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’. A Healing Question was written in response to Cromwell’s declaration of mid-March 1656 appointing a day of national fasting and prayer ‘that the Lord would pardon the iniquities both of magistrate and people in these lands, wherein the magistrate desires first to take shame to himself and find out His [God’s] provocation’ – principally in preventing an English victory in the Western Design.586A Declaration of His Highness, Inviting the People of England and Wales to a Day of Solemn Fasting and Humiliation (1656, 669 f.20.25). Vane diagnosed the cause of the nation’s ills as the ‘great interruption’ lately made in their right to ‘successive representatives of their own election and setting up’ in favour of ‘something ... that seems rather accommodated to the private and selfish interest of a particular part [i.e. the protectorate] ... than truly adequate to the common good and concern of the whole body engaged in this cause’.587Vane, A Healing Question, 2-3. His aim in writing A Healing Question was to call upon ‘the honest party, that still agree in the reason and justice of the good old cause [here was the origin of this potent slogan]’, to come together ‘and agree upon a safe and righteous bottom’ for settlement. Failure to do so, he warned, would leave the honest people at the mercy of ‘the common enemy’ and result in the ‘needless hazard (if not loss) of the cause they have been so deeply engaged in’.588Vane, A Healing Question, postscript. The ‘honest’ or ‘good party’ alone possessed the right to exercise political choice, and this group could be distinguished from ‘all neuters, close and open enemies and deceitful friends or apostates’ by its ‘forwardness to assist and own the public welfare and good of the nation, for the attaining and preserving the just rights and liberties thereof ... either in civils, or in spirituals, or in both’. The Saints’ right to rule was validated by their engagement in the good old cause (and the triumph of that cause), and this, in turn, was a sign of their election by God: ‘the law of success and conquest did uphold them who had the inward warrant of justice and righteousness to encourage them in their actings’.589Vane, A Healing Question, 8-9; The Political Works of James Harrington ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), 39-40 Vane’s definition of this godly elite excluded not only those who had opposed the regicide and Rump – a group that included both the Presbyterians and the Levellers – but also ungodly republicans such as Henry Marten and Thomas Chaloner.590Mayers, ‘Real and practicable’, 41-2. The good party’s divisions, argued Vane, stemmed from the determination of those ‘now in power at the head of the army’ to maintain themselves ‘in a divided interest from the rest of the body of honest men’, rather than trust to the ‘whole body of the good people’ and submit themselves ‘with their fellow adherents to the cause, under the rule and authority of their own supreme judicature’. Rather than lay aside the army, as some of the protectorate’s republican critics advocated, Vane sought its re-incorporation in the body of the honest party.591Vane, A Healing Question, 11; Mayers, ‘Real and practicable’, 42, 56.

In order to heal the fractures within the godly community, Vane proposed that ‘the very persons now in power’ should convene a ‘general council or convention of faithful, honest and discerning men, chosen for that purpose by the free consent of the whole body of adherents to this cause in the several parts of the nations ... to debate freely and agree upon the particulars that by way of fundamental constitutions shall be laid and inviolably observed’.592Vane, A Healing Question, 20. Without being prescriptive, he evidently anticipated that this convention would lead to the establishment of supreme legislature – whereby the good party ‘may have the use and benefit of the choicest light and wisdom of the nation that they are capable to call forth for the rule and government under which they will live’ – bounded by a ‘fundamental constitution’ that would preserve complete liberty of conscience.593Vane, A Healing Question, 3, 7. As a result of this

mutual and happy transition ... between the party of honest men in the three nations virtually in arms and those actually so now in power at the head of the army, how suddenly would the union of the whole body be consolidated and made so firm as it will not need to fear all the designs and attempts of the common enemy.594Vane, A Healing Question, 11.

Once this supreme legislative had been established and the principle acknowledged that sovereignty resided ‘originally in the whole body of adherents to this cause’, Vane thought it not improper that a ‘standing council of state [be] settled for life in reference to the safety of the commonwealth and for the maintaining intercourse and commerce with foreign states’. He even admitted the possibility of placing ‘that branch of sovereignty which chiefly respects the execution of the laws’ in the hands of ‘one single person, if need require’. But whatever arrangement was adopted to exercise executive power, it must be recognised ‘as naturally arising and resulting from the free choice and consent of the whole body, taken out from among themselves as flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone’, and would remain subordinate to the ‘supreme national assemblies’.595Vane, A Healing Question, 17-18. To the objection that the ‘diffused body’ of the honest party might elect unfaithful representatives, he answered that God had already prepared ‘a choice and selected number of the people unto this work, that are tried and refined by their inward and outward experiences in this great quarrel ... In respect whereof, well qualified persons are to be found, if due care be but taken in the choice of them’.596Vane, A Healing Question, 19.

Vane’s approach in The Healing Question has been described as ‘restrained, reasonable and above all eirenical’, and offering ‘a more positive and realistic solution than most republican critics, whose recommendations ranged from hazardous free elections to restoring the reputedly corrupt and oligarchical remnant of the Long Parliament’.597Mayers, ‘Real and practicable’, 72; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’. Certainly Vane was not unduly prescriptive about the particular form of government to be adopted by the righteous republic he was proposing (he did not, for example, call for the restoration of the Rump). He went out of his way to commend the ‘wise general [Cromwell] and sober, faithful soldiers’, while insisting that the blame for the good party’s afflictions did not rest solely with the Cromwellian establishment: ‘what hath been done amongst us may probably have been more the effect of temptation then the product of any malicious design, and this sort of temptation is very common and incident to men in power (how good soever they may be)’.598Vane, A Healing Question, 12, 23; Mayers, ‘Real and practicable’, 57-61. Nevertheless, the first published rebuttal of A Healing Question argued that Vane’s proposal to confine power to those supposedly possessed of an ‘inward warrant of justice and righteousness’ was ‘capricious, liable to be arrogated by any number of aspiring conquerors and therefore incapable of guaranteeing political security’.599Parnham, ‘Politics spun out of theology’, 68.

Although A Healing Question was welcomed by Lieutenant-general Charles Fleetwood* and circulated in manuscript among other members of the protectoral council, Vane was already suspected by Henry Cromwell*, and doubtless by other leading Cromwellians, of trying to withdraw those ‘who are as rotten in their principles [as Vane]... from their submission to the present government’.600Proceeds of the Protector, 4; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 16; TSP iv. 509. ‘At the first coming out of’ this publication ‘it was applauded’, claimed Secretary John Thurloe* in June 1656, ‘but now upon second thoughts it is rejected as being impracticable and aiming, in truth, at the setting up the Long Parliament [i.e. the Rump] again’.601TSP v. 122, 317. This change of heart towards Vane’s pamphlet has been interpreted as a ‘logical response’ to the victory of those on the protectoral council who urged the calling of another Parliament and thus the perpetuation of the Cromwellian regime.602Supra, ‘John Lambert’; Mayers, ‘Real and practicable’, 67.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in August 1656, Vane came out of political retirement and stood as a candidate for one of Lincolnshire’s ten county seats. In an effort to frustrate his return, the council summoned him to Whitehall on the appointed election day, 12 August, to answer for his publication of A Healing Question. Other leading commonwealthsmen, including Bradshawe and Ludlowe, were summoned at the same time, and – in the case of Vane and Richard Salwey – it was rumoured that their offence had been their attempting ‘to dissuade the people from electing swordsmen, major-generals and decimators’. Vane chose to delay his compliance with the council’s summons, informing Whitehall that he intended to depart Belleau for his house on The Strand, near Charing Cross, on 11 August.603Clarke Pprs. iii. 68; Proceeds of the Protector, 1, 2. Major-general Edward Whalley*, writing to Thurloe on 9 August, insisted that Vane had ‘no great [electoral] interest in Lincolnshire’ and that the only thing likely to secure his return was the perceived injustice of his being summoned to Whitehall ‘at this juncture of time’.604TSP v. 296. On 11 August, Whalley reported that Vane’s ‘friends [had] laboured much to procure him chosen at Boston, but finding their endeavours fruitless [they] did not at all openly appear for him. They are now labouring for him in the county’.605TSP v. 299. In the event, Vane was beaten into fourteenth place on a poll for the county seats – one better than his friend Richard Cust – in what was a hotly contested election.606Supra, ‘Lincolnhire’. Thurloe informed Henry Cromwell in late August that Vane had ‘poled ... in three places and missed it in all’ – although if Vane did indeed stand for other constituencies besides Lincolnshire the evidence has not survived.

When Vane attended the council on 21 August 1656, he admitted to having written and published A Healing Question – or so Thurloe claimed – ‘though in terms dark and mysterious ... as his manner is’.607TSP v. 349. He also handed to Cromwell a paper (which he later had published), denouncing the protector’s use of the army to usurp the power that Vane thought properly belonged to the ‘good people of this nation in Parliament assembled’. If Cromwell did not cease his ‘aiming at the throne in spirituals as well as in temporals’, or his ‘politic contrivances’ against ‘the suffering Saints and the anointed ones of the Lord Jesus’, Vane warned that God would ‘arise suddenly and tear you in pieces’. The day was at hand, declared Vane, when the ‘ruling powers of the whole earth shall yield subjection and think it their glory to become subservient to the bringing forth of the new heavens and that new earth wherein dwells righteousness and truth’. Proclaiming himself Cromwell’s ‘ancient friend’, Vane offered this warning in the hope that the protector would repent of his persecution of the Saints and ‘endeavour to recover their hearts to you and their prayers for you’.608Proceeds of the Protector, 7-9; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 16. The council judged A Healing Question ‘seditious ... [and] tending to the disturbance of the present government and peace of the commonwealth’ and ordered him to enter bond for £5,000 as security for his good conduct on pain of imprisonment.609Proceeds of the Protector, 2. Vane responded with an open letter to the council in which he denied its legal authority to demand such a bond and therefore his refusal to provide one. It was no small grief to him, he declared, that the ‘evil and wretched principles’ of Charles I’s absolutist ‘misgovernment ... should now revive and spring up so evidently in the hands of men professing godliness’.610Proceeds of the Protector, 3-4. On 4 September, the council issued a warrant for Vane’s imprisonment in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, where he spent the next three months.611CSP Dom. 1656-7, pp. 98, 194; Proceeds of the Protector, 5-6; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 16. After Vane’s release, claimed Ludlowe, Cromwell subjected him to ‘another kind of persecution’ by attempting to have his title to ‘certain forest walks’ near Raby Castle declared defective in the hope that ‘he would be forced into a compliance ... with the present government’.612Ludlow, Mems. ii. 30; C.H. Firth, ‘Cromwell and Sir Henry Vane, EHR xxvi. 751-4.

Vane’s pamphlet A Needful Corrective or Ballance in Popular Government developed some of the ideas he had introduced in A Healing Question. Although probably not published until May 1659, it was written in response to a pamphlet by the republican theorist James Harrington, The Prerogative of Popular Government, which appeared in print in November 1657.613J. Harrington, The Prerogative of Popular Government (1657), E.929.7; A.H. Woolrych, ‘The Good Old Cause and the fall of the protectorate’, CHJ xiii. 154. Writing as an anonymous ‘advocate for the godly man’, Vane referred to himself as one with ‘a sincere and hearty friendship ... of true godliness, how shameful soever the miscarriage hath been, in these our days, of those that having only the form of it, have served themselves thereof to advance their worldly interests’.614Vane, A Needful Corrective or Ballance in Popular Government, 2-3. He praised the ‘essentials’ of Harrington’s work, its commendable attention to the structures of republican government, but he took issue with its central premise of a commonwealth, based upon the regulated distribution of property and other constitutional mechanisms, that effectively dispensed with the need for godly foundations. For Vane, the fundamental difficulty in creating a viable republic was ‘to show how the depraved, corrupted and self-interested will of man, in a great body, which we call the people, being once left to its free motion, shall be prevailed with to espouse their true public interest’. Most men, he claimed, were so fearful of the ‘boundless power of the people’s will unbridled’ that they preferred to live in ‘bondage’ under the power of the sword.615Vane, A Needful Corrective, 6. The key to the ‘well constituting a commonwealth’, he argued, especially ‘in a nation much divided in affection and interest about their own government’, was to start by ensuring that the ‘right and privilege of a free citizen’, including the franchise, was restricted either to

such as are free born in respect of their holy and righteous principles, flowing from the birth of the spirit of God in them ... or else who, by their tried good affection and faithfulness to common right and public freedom, have deserved to be trusted with the keeping or bearing their own arms in the public defence.616Vane, A Needful Corrective, 7-8.

A commonwealth such as Harrington was proposing, based upon a broad franchise and relying for ‘balance’ upon rotation of office and plebiscites, was unworkable according to Vane ‘whilst holiness in principles by way of spiritual birth is wanting amongst the people’.617Vane, A Needful Corrective, 8. Only where ‘the foundations of government shall be laid so firm and deep as the word of God’ would there be ‘a heavenly balance ... which keeps all even’.618Vane, A Needful Corrective, 9. To achieve this balance, he argued, it would first be necessary to allow a ‘selected number of citizens’ – i.e. the honest party – to elect a ‘ruling senate’, the ‘excellency’ of whose debates, over time, would educate the people in the ways of righteousness.619Vane, A Needful Corrective, 8, 9. But the true perfection of this work, he thought, would not be possible until the ‘mighty and universal pouring out of the spirit upon all flesh’ had restored man ‘to the gift and exercise of righteousness in his natural judgement and will’ and had thus rendered the people ‘unto God a kingdom and holy nation’. Then could the public, by ‘free suffrage’, elect a ‘senate or council of elders’ which would exercise executive authority as well as the legislative function in terms of drafting laws. This council would meet with the ‘representative body of the people’ – which would be called on a regular basis and elected, again, by free suffrage – in one ‘general and great assembly’, where the laws proposed by the senate would receive ‘the distinct and public vote of the people’s consent’ before they were enacted.620Vane, A Needful Corrective, 9-11; Parnham, ‘Politics spun out of theology’, 67-8.

Here, in Vane’s opinion, was ‘the most exact platform of the purest kind of popular government, and that which hath its foundation and first pattern in the word of God [and] in the practice of Israel’s commonwealth’.621Vane, A Needful Corrective, 10. As in A Healing Question, Vane was presenting what he thought was the blueprint for a godly republic that would carry wide appeal within the honest party: one that accorded with scripture and yet seemed to reconcile elements of Harrington’s model – a law-making senate and a popular assembly that accepted or rejected laws by ballot – the millenarian sensitivities of the Fifth Monarchists and the desire of the commonwealthsmen for some form of representative government.622Mayers, I659, 220-1; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’.

Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, 1659

In the weeks before the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, ‘divers persons who continued unshaken in their zeal and affection to the commonwealth’ met at Vane’s house on The Strand, ‘where they consulted what would be most proper for them to do in case any of them should be elected to serve in the approaching assembly’. After ‘mature deliberation’ they resolved that ‘if they should be fairly chosen and that no unjust or dishonourable thing were required of them, they should accept the employment.623TSP vii. 541; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 50. This caucus apparently included Hesilrige, Thomas Scot I and John Weaver*.

Vane stood as a candidate for both Hull and Bristol – ‘at both which places’, claimed Ludlowe, ‘he had the majority’, but he was denied a seat through the machinations of the court interest.624Ludlow, Mems. ii. 51. The election at Hull was certainly a hard fought affair involving five candidates. The front-runners were evidently John Ramsden (a Presbyterian former aldermen of the town) and Andrew Marvell* – who may have stood together – although it was thought that Vane had a ‘considerable party’ and might gain a seat ‘by the divisions of the rest’.625Supra, ‘Kingston-upon-Hull’; Add. 21427, f. 262. The contest went to a poll in which Ramsden and Marvell received the ‘major vote’ of the freemen and were returned accordingly. Vane acknowledged that the ‘major part’ had indeed voted for Ramsden and Marvell, but he attributed this outcome to ‘the practices of some and the influence of [the] court party’.626Supra, ‘Kingston-upon-Hull’; Hull Hist. Centre, C BRL/635. If Vane stood for election at Bristol it has left no evidence in the town archives.627Supra, ‘Bristol’. Defeated at Hull, and possibly Bristol, he was offered a place at Whitchurch, in Hampshire, by his former colleague on the CBK, Robert Wallop. On this occasion, the court party exerted itself openly in an attempt to frustrate Vane’s election, but Wallop refused to be intimidated, and Vane and another former Rumper, Robert Reynolds, were duly returned.628Supra, ‘Whitchurch’; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 51, 52.

Vane waited almost a fortnight before taking his seat – probably to make sure that he would not have to take the oath of loyalty to Protector Richard – making his first appearance in the Commons on 8 February 1659.629Henry Cromwell Corresp. 448, 459-60; M. Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell and Restoration of Charles I (1856), i. 301; Rowe, Vane, 208-9. He was named to 13 committees in this Parliament – beginning on 17 February with his appointment to a powerful 12-man committee to consider the size and deployment of the protectorate’s armed forces and how to manage the revenues of England, Ireland and Scotland so as to defray and reduce the cost of maintaining the government and military establishment.630CJ vii. 605a, 605b, 609a, 614b, 622a, 622b, 623b, 627a, 632a, 637a, 639a, 641b, 644b. This committee was given power to summon and give order to ‘the auditors and other officers under the pay of the commonwealth’.631CJ vii. 605a. He was also named to committees concerning the Lincolnshire fens and the enfranchisement of County Durham.632CJ vii. 609a, 622b.

Vane spoke frequently, and often eloquently, in debate and was generally successful – certainly more so than Hesilrige – in concealing his complicity in the commonwealthsmen’s attempts to string out the House’s proceedings that the court party ‘might not be able to drive so furiously’, and in order to gain time ‘to infuse good principles’ into those many Members who were new to Parliament.633Supra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 55-6; Rowe, Vane, 211; D. Hirst, ‘Concord and discord in Richard Cromwell’s House of Commons’, EHR ciii. 343, 347, 351-4. He delivered his first major speech in the House on 9 February 1659, during a debate on the bill of recognition (the bill confirming Richard Cromwell as protector).. After pleading for ‘patience to hear one another and ... the variety of reasons and judgements which are offered by all men’, he made clear his firm adherence to the fundamental commonwealth principle that all just power, ‘by the law of nature and reason’, is originally invested in the people as represented in the Commons and that they could dispose of it how and to whom they thought fit. Providence, he felt sure, had declared against ‘the ancient fabric of government’ by king, Lords and Commons. He spoke approvingly of the regicide and the proceedings of the Rump in establishing a ‘free state, to bring the people out of bondage from all pretence of superiority over them’. It had been plain to him in 1649, he declared, and evidently still was, ‘that all offices had their rise from the people and that all should be accountable to them. If this be monstrous, then it is monstrous to be safe and rational and to bear your own good’. To those who objected that England was not able to sustain such a government, he answered that the Dutch republic had managed to do so, as did other states. He attacked the protectoral constitution, the Humble Petition and Advice, as a ‘a pair of stairs to ascend the throne; a step to king, Lords and Commons’. If the House was minded to return to the ‘old government’, he warned, ‘you are not many steps from the old family [the Stuarts]. They will be too hard for you if that government be restored’. At the dissolution of the Rump, he argued, the Commons had lost its ‘possession’, not its ‘right’. The Humble Petition ‘is only a nomination, which hath nothing of constitution until you have made it’. Rather than recognise Richard Cromwell as ‘the son of a conqueror [Oliver Cromwell] by [right of] nature, make him a son by adoption. Take him into your own family and make him such an one as the Great One shall direct you. When the army see they are yours, they will be protectored by you’.634Burton’s Diary, iii. 171-80; iv. 71; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, pp. 111-14; W.A.H. Schilling, ‘The Parliamentary Diary of Sir John Gell, 5 Feb.-21 Mar. 1659’ (Vanderbilt Univ. MA thesis, 1961), 49-51. Reporting on this speech to Cardinal Mazarin, the French ambassador, Antoine de Bordeaux, expressed the view that most republicans were not intent on bringing down the protector, ‘only they wish to limit his power and to deprive him of the command of the forces’.635Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 302.

With this speech, Vane confirmed his place among the leaders of the commonwealthsmen – the group at Westminster that opposed the protectoral settlement and sought to have the militia, the negative voice and all other prerogative powers exercised by Protector Richard and his council re-invested in a sovereign House of Commons. Joining Vane at the vanguard of this republican interest were Hesilrige, Scot, Thomas Chaloner and other prominent former Rumpers. It is very likely that Vane’s rapprochement with his sometime antagonists in the Rump preceded the convening of the 1659 Parliament by several weeks at the very least – indeed, in some cases possibly by several years.636TSP v. 296; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 50. He worked particularly closely in the House with Hesilrige – the two men seconding each other’s motions and sometimes following up one another’s speeches.637Burton’s Diary, iii. 149, 194, 303, 327, 346, 366, 369, 452, 546; iv. 109, 270, 314, 347, 348, 472; Rowe, Vane, 212. On 23 February, Hesilrige went out of his way to praise Vane’s political and financial acumen and, in particular, his role in reviving the Rump’s military fortunes against the Dutch in 1652-3.638Burton’s Diary, iii. 442-3. Vane, in turn, defended his fellow MP Henry Neville – one of Marten’s ‘gang’ in the Rump – against charges of atheism and blasphemy: ‘When they could accuse our Saviour of nothing else, they brought in [allegations of] blasphemy’.639Burton’s Diary, iii. 298. He can also take some of the credit for securing a Commons’ order for the release of the republican army officer Colonel Robert Overton, who had been incarcerated for more than four years without trial on suspicion of plotting against the protectorate.640Burton’s Diary, iv. 120, 152-3, 154; Oxford DNB, ‘Robert Overton’. Predictably, Vane demonstrated rather less sympathy towards William Boteler*, who was assailed in the Commons for his high-handed proceedings as a major-general.641Burton’s Diary, iv. 410, 412. However, he had to tread carefully when it came to criticising senior army men, for by February it appears that he and Hesilrige had reached an understanding with Lambert and other republican army officers.642Supra, ‘John Lambert’; TSP vii. 660; J. Milton, Complete Prose Works of John Milton vii ed. R.W. Ayers (1975), 15, 16. As Vane had mentioned in his speech of 9 February, he wished to see the army ‘protectored’ by the Commons, thereby encouraging the soldiery to accept their proper subordination to the people’s representatives. On 12 March and again on 7 April, he urged the House to ensure prompt payment of the soldiers’ arrears, ‘else you may be in destruction before you are aware’.643Burton’s Diary, iv. 140, 141, 365.

Having lost the vote on whether the bill of recognition should extend to acknowledging Richard Cromwell ‘to be the undoubted lord protector and chief magistrate of the commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland’, the commonwealthsmen switched their attention to the question of how the protector’s powers should be bounded.644CJ vii. 603b. Vane’s speeches in this debate in mid-February were very much in line with the position of the commonwealthsmen generally on this issue – that the power of the militia, the negative voice and other prerogative powers should be vested in ‘the people’ (i.e. the Commons) and Richard reduced to the status of little more than a cipher. Vane declaimed against ‘a thing called kingly power, which implies the whole affair of monarchy and prerogative, which are great occasions of vain expenses and waste’. He thought it ‘fit and requisite’ that the protector should be denied a legislative veto. ‘Pronounce your judgement’, he urged the House, ‘that the chief magistrate shall have no negative upon the people assembled in Parliament’. The only legitimate power that Vane would allow the protector was a vague authority ‘to draw in the public spirits of the nation to a public interest’. It was necessary ‘so to bind him [the protector]’, argued Vane, ‘as he may grow up with the public interest’.645Burton’s Diary, iii. 316, 318-20, 331, 344.

When Thurloe made a long report to the House on 21 February 1659 concerning foreign affairs, ‘declaring a million of money needful for defraying the naval expenses for this summer’, Vane followed other commonwealthsmen in questioning not only the government’s foreign policy commitments (in supporting Sweden against Denmark) but also in exposing what they saw as a design to inveigle £1,000,000 for a ‘pretended war’ that would increase the power of the protector.646Burton’s Diary, iii. 376-84, 384, 401; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, pp. 137-8; S. Bethel*, A True and Impartial Narrative (1659), 7-8 (E.985.25); Rowe, Vane, 213-14. He developed this theme on 23 February, when he argued that voting ‘the expenditure of a million of money’ was, in effect, to surrender to the protector ‘the right of the militia’.647Burton’s Diary, iii. 441-2, 447. He was even more insistent on 24 February: ‘the committing this business to his Highness [the protector] will at once give away your militia as to the naval part. The next step will be your militia at land, and then you are concluded in your claim to the militia’.648Burton’s Diary, iii. 451. Foreign policy, he assured the House, was being ‘all along managed to support the interest of a single person and not for the public good, the people’s interest. Our counsels have been mingled with France and taken from the cardinal [Mazarin], who goeth upon the most tyrannical principles of government in the world’. Sending a fleet to the Sound, as the government proposed, smacked to Vane of a design by the protector to take charge of the navy and assert his authority over the militia ‘before you [the Commons] have asserted your own right or taken it upon yourselves. Oh, but would you make the single person no other than a committeeman!’ Vane advised the House to ‘assert your militia to be in you’ and to appoint a committee to manage foreign policy ‘to the most public advantage’.649Burton’s Diary, iii. 489-92; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, pp. 149-50; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 120-1. A majority of MPs voted to leave the management of the fleet – and, by implication, foreign policy generally – to the protector. However, it was reportedly the commonwealthsmen’s efforts that secured the addition to this resolution of the words ‘saving the interest of this House in the militia and in making of peace and war’.650CJ vii. 607b; Bethel, True and Impartial Narrative, 8.

Before the House was diverted onto the question of foreign affairs, the focus of contention had shifted to the vexed question of the Cromwellian Other House and whether it was first necessary to decide the status of this body before determining who had the negative voice. Vane, as he explained on 18 February, was very much for settling the issue of the negative voice first. Reverse the order of debate, he told the Commons, ‘and you will have that brought in upon you from the Other House that will confirm the single person in all things that concern him, and so your own liberties are left at loose’.651Burton’s Diary, iii. 343-4, 368; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 89-90. On 1 March, he broadened his attack upon the Other House, insisting that there was ‘no power in that Petition and Advice for this protector [as opposed to his father] to nominate another House ... I would have you first examine whether those now sitting have any foundation as now called by that law’. But whether the Other House was properly constituted according to the Petition and Advice was a secondary issue as far as Vane was concerned, for he was adamant that the Commons ‘have as much power as those that made the Petition and Advice’ and could set up whatever second chamber they pleased. Ideally, he wanted the whole matter left until the next Parliament – in other words, permanently deferred.652Burton’s Diary, iii. 565-6; Wilts. RO, 9/34/3, p. 158; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 143. Returning to the fray on 7 March, he declared the Petition and Advice ‘a mere show’ to fool the people and warned the Commons that to approve the Other House was to ‘set up a means to perpetuate an arbitrary power over you, to lay yourselves aside and make you forever useless ... I know no hindrance but you may transact with his Highness alone and agree of another House in the best way for the good of the nation’.653Burton’s Diary, iv. 71-2. He re-iterated this point on 28 March, arguing that by voting to transact with the Other House ‘as an House of Parliament’, the Commons would ‘bind yourselves hand and foot and deliver yourselves up, unable forever to do aught for the good of the people’.654CJ vii. 621b; Burton’s Diary, iv. 292-3. More provocatively, he insisted that to transact with the Other House was to concede that Parliament was constituted on nothing more than ‘prudence’ – that is, mere necessity and reason of state. This caused ‘some heat’ among MPs, with Thomas Grove demanding that he be called to the bar of the House to explain himself.655Burton’s Diary, iv. 290; Nicholas Pprs. iv. 84, 89; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 488. His final broadside against the Other House – in opposition to motion on 5 April for publishing a declaration in the name of the protector and ‘both’ Houses – was equally impassioned, equally repetitious of his previous speeches and equally futile. By approving this vote, he informed the House,

you admit a power both in them [the Other House] and the chief magistrate which is yet but in you and under a possessory right. You give them, by this, as much power as is in you to give. No bounds are given to this Other House ... you leave the chief magistrate boundless.656CJ vii. 625b-626a; Burton’s Diary, iv. 339, 340.

Vane was no less vociferous in his denunciation of the 60 Scottish and Irish Members who sat in the Commons. The commonwealthsmen regarded these MPs as Cromwellian placemen, whose right to sit was grounded solely upon the will of the protector. ‘A greater imposition never was by a single person upon a Parliament, to put 60 votes upon you’, Vane declared on 9 March.657Burton’s Diary, iv. 105. ‘Addition and subtraction, fraud and force’, was his view of the regime’s proceedings on this matter

The protector [Oliver Cromwell], that he might make the Petition and Advice, took away from the Parliament 140 that were duly chosen and returned and, that it might not be repealed, he added 60 out of the Irish and Scots, besides some new boroughs – and that by the prerogative, they having no legal foundation to sit there.658Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 195.

His line throughout the protracted debates on this issue was that the Scottish and Irish Members, like the Other House, were ‘not duly and warrantably called’ by law, even under the terms of the Petition and Advice.659Burton’s Diary, iv. 114, 118, 122-3, 169, 178-81; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 197-8, 200, 202-3. In a long speech on 18 March, he defended the Anglo-Scottish union negotiated in the last days of the Rump, but he argued that neither it nor the union laid out in the Petition and Advice had been ‘perfected’. It was one thing, he insisted, to be ‘united and incorporated’ with Scotland, ‘another thing to be equally represented in Parliament by a right constitution’. The 1659 Parliament had been ‘called upon the old bottom’ – that is, the traditional, pre-Instrument of Government franchise – ‘when no law was afoot to call Scotland or Ireland’. Only once the House had settled its own constitution should any representatives from Scotland and Ireland be summoned and not before.660Burton’s Diary, iv. 178-81; Schilling, ‘Gell Diary’, 237-40. Until the status of the Scottish and Irish Members had been decided, argued the commonwealthsmen, they should withdraw – a de facto purge that would greatly reduce the court party’s majority in the Commons. At the end of this debate on 18 March, Vane and Lambert were tellers in favour of the Scottish Members withdrawing but were heavily defeated.661CJ vii. 616a. Aware they were in the minority, the commonwealthsmen and other opponents of the protectoral settlement attempted to delay the vote recognising the Scottish MPs, with Vane and William White serving as tellers on 21 March against putting the question of whether the Scottish Members should continue to sit in the House. But they lost this division as well, and when the main question was put the pro-Cromwellian majority prevailed once again.662CJ vii. 616b; Burton’s Diary, iv. 219. The next day (22 Mar.), it was the turn of the Irish Members to have their constitutional status debated by the House, with Vane pursuing his familiar theme that their presence had no legal foundation. ‘Ireland was but a province’, he declaimed, and yet by allowing the Irish Members to sit the Commons ‘make them a power not only to make laws for themselves but for this nation; nay, to have a casting vote, for aught I know, in all your laws. Such a high breach of Parliament never was, like this of the chief magistrate imposing Members upon you’.663Burton’s Diary, iv. 229-30. But when the House divided the following day (23 Mar.) on whether the Irish Members should continue to sit, the commonwealthsmen lost this vote too.

By late March 1659, Vane and his republican friends were wearying of the unequal struggle against ‘the court strain’ at Westminster and were using increasingly intemperate language to vent their frustration.664Nicholas Pprs. iv. 89. ‘All you have done these two months’, Vane admonished the House on 31 March, ‘is to settle all power without you, but nothing is done for the people’. He had been moved to anger on this occasion by a bill for settling the excise revenues on the protector for life. ‘I never heard the like, to settle this for life ... If the settlement be to settle tyranny and slavery, I hope you will not give money to maintain it’.665Burton’s Diary, iv. 313. The report on 4 April (misdated 2 April in Thomas Burton’s* published diary) of a declaration appointing a day of fasting and public humiliation and inviting magistrates to suppress ‘blasphemies and damnable heresies’ inspired more words of exasperated distress. ‘This imposition upon consciences is, I fear, the setting up of that which you always cried out against and disowned for your cause ... All is lost. It is a coercing the conscience’.666Burton’s Diary, iv. 329; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 62-3; J.R. Fitzgibbons, ‘Reconstructing the debates of the protectorate Parliaments’, PH xxxv. 238. He bridled, too, at the suggestion that this declaration required the consent of the Other House and the protector, for this would be to ‘admit a power both in them and the chief magistrate which is yet but in you’. In this one proposal, Vane perceived the entire destruction of the people’s liberties

No bounds are given to this Other House ... As much as in you lies, you leave the chief magistrate boundless ... If the two of the three estates agree, they may act without you ... In every step you have yet gone you give away all. Do something that may make you appear to be trustees [of the people] indeed and not in one moment give away all that you have fought for.667Burton’s Diary, iv. 339.

He spoke ‘very high, as was usual’, remarked Burton – although, as was usual, to little discernible effect except to waste time.668Burton’s Diary, iv. 343.

Outside the Commons, however, the ground was crumbling under the protectoral party’s feet. Late in March 1659, Fleetwood, John Disbrowe* and other senior Cromwellian officers began to make overtures to the civilian republicans, using Ludlowe as their principal go-between.669Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 60-1. Vane and Hesilrige, though declining to meet with the disaffected officers in person, assured them ‘that when they saw it seasonable they would be ready to assist them in all things tending to the public service’.670Ludlow, Mems. ii. 65. With London full of angry soldiers by mid-April, Vane and his allies in the Commons defended the proceedings of the general council of officers in agitating against the protectorate. On 18 April, as the Commons debated how to bring the army to heel, Vane went further, claiming that he had been informed by a member of the protectoral council that Richard had summoned the senior commanders ‘on purpose to try the officers if they would take commissions from him, exclusive of this Parliament’.671Burton’s Diary, iv. 457-8; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 63-4. Here, Vane was apparently stirring for all he was worth, anxious to widen the breach between the army and the Commons and between the officers and the protector. Nevertheless, he apparently shared Hesilrige’s anger at the army’s dissolution of Parliament on 22 April, joining him and 40 or 50 other Members in attempting to resume their seats three days later (25 Apr.) only to find the door of the House ‘shut and guarded with soldiers’.672[A. Annesley*], England’s Confusion (1659), 8-9 (E.985.1); Clarke Pprs. v. 290; Hirst, ‘Concord and discord’, 355.

The restored Rump, 1659

Once it became clear that nothing but the recall of the Rump would satisfy the army, the senior officers abandoned their attempts to save the protectorate and sent a delegation, headed by Lambert, to hold talks with Vane, Hesilrige, Ludlowe and Salwey. Several conferences took place at Vane’s house at which it was agreed to restore the Rump – although this decision was reached only after the four commonwealthsmen had debated, and laid aside, a proposal from the officers that ‘the government of the nation should be by a representative of the people and by a select senate’.673[Annesley], England’s Confusion, 9; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 74-7; Clarke Pprs. iv. 6-7, 8; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 69-71. The idea of a select senate of visible Saints and approved army officers held particular appeal for Vane, but it was anathema to Hesilrige, Scot and most other republican politicians.674Woolrych, ‘The Good Old Cause’, 153-4. Despite his reservations at the role of the army in the protectorate’s downfall and the fact that the Rump did not represent his ideal godly republic, he nonetheless welcomed the events of late April and early May as a providential sign of God’s blessing upon the nation. In a letter to Hull corporation on 10 May he proffered his services as a ‘member of that Parliament which God hath [by His] mighty and wonderful hand restored to its sitting ... as formerly’.675Hull Hist. Centre, C BRL/635. It was reported in June that Vane had been instrumental in persuading the ‘Congregated churches’ to fall in behind the restoration of the Rump.676Clarke Pprs. v. 299.

One of 40 or so Rumpers who took their seats in the restored Rump on 7 May 1659, Vane was named to committees for drawing up a declaration vindicating the recall of the Rump, for considering who was eligible to sit in the restored Commons, and to attend Fleetwood and acquaint him with the House’s ‘good acceptance of the affections of the officers of the army to the Parliament’.677CJ vii. 645a, 646a. As de facto leaders of the House, it fell largely to Vane and Hesilrige to ensure the re-exclusion of William Prynne, who had managed to enter the Commons’ chamber before a guard of soldiers had been placed at the door.678W. Prynne, A True and Perfect Narrative (1659), 9-12 (E.767.1). Between May and mid-October 1659, Vane was named to a total of 37 ad hoc committees – a significant proportion of them relating in one way or other to the management and improvement of the commonwealth’s revenues, the maintenance of the army and the settling of the English militia.679CJ vii. 648a, 656b, 672b, 676b, 684b, 691a, 694b, 726a, 729a, 757b, 762a, 772a. Named on 10 May to committees for inspecting and improving the commonwealth’s treasuries and to consider the cases of prisoners of conscience and how they might be discharged, he chaired the second of these bodies, which effected the release of a number of Quakers, who noted that he still resented Friends’ refusal to take off their hats in his presence.680CJ vii. 648a; Jnl. of George Fox, i. 341; W.C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (1912), 457-8.

Vane was included on most of the restored Rump’s principal executive committees – beginning on 7 May 1659 with his nomination alongside Fleetwood, Lambert, Hesilrige, Ludlowe, Salwey and several others to a ‘committee of safety’, which was authorised to ‘seize and secure such as might justly be suspected of any design to disturb the public peace and also to remove such officers of the army as they should think fit and to fill their places with others, till the Parliament should take farther order therein’. This committee drew up the legislation for a new council of state, to which it handed the baton of executive government on 23 May.681CJ vii. 645a, 646a, 652b, 658a; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 79-80, 85; Clarke Pprs. iv. 9. Named to a seven-man commission that the Rump set up on 13 May to nominate officers for the ‘land-forces of this commonwealth’, Vane made no reports from this body, whose leading civilian member was undoubtedly Hesilrige.682Supra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; CJ vii. 651a; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 88. Having been elected on 14 May to a new council of state, Vane managed to avoid what was for him the disagreeable obligation of taking the oath prescribed for the councillors.683CJ vii. 654a; Rowe, Vane, 220; Mayers, 1659, 57 At the end of May, the Rump appointed him to a new commission for managing the admiralty, although he attended less than a third of this body’s meetings and did not resume the leading role in naval affairs that he had exercised in 1649-53.684ADM2/1731; CJ vii. 666a, 670a; Rowe, Vane, 219; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 223-4; Hammond, ‘English Navy’, 69.

The most important institutional context for Vane’s work in the restored Rump was the 7 May committee of safety and its successor the council of state – both of which he attended on a regular basis.685Bodl. Rawl. C.179, passim; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. xxiv; 1659-60, p. xxiii-xxiv, xxviii. During the seven months that separated the Rump’s restoration in May and its dissolution by the army in October, he made six reports from the committee and a further 26 from the council, on matters ranging from the state of the fleet and the pay of the armed forces, to the land settlement in Ireland and a bill for the union of England and Scotland.686CJ vii. 653a, 657a, 663b, 666b, 736b, 737a, 744b, 747a, 755a, 773a, 776a. As a member of the committee of safety and of various conciliar committees for ‘discovering designs against the commonwealth’, he probably shared with Thomas Scot the role of head of the Rump’s security and intelligence service.687Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 12-13, 175, 199, 403-5; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 374; Rowe, Vane, 220; Mayers, 1659, 118-19, 172. It was as a member of the council’s committee for examinations that Vane, partnered by Hesilrige, led the interrogation of Sir George Boothe* after the latter’s failed Presbyterian-royalist insurrection in August.688CJ vii. 768a, 768b, 770a, 785b, 786a; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 147, 154, 170; Rowe, Vane, 220.

But the bulk of Vane’s time and energy on the council was almost certainly taken up with the management of foreign affairs. Over two thirds of the council’s reports to the House concerning diplomatic matters and the state of play in the Rump’s dealings with the Dutch republic, Denmark, Sweden and France were delivered by Vane. In addition, he sat on a majority of the conciliar committees to confer with ambassadors and foreign envoys, chairing nine of them.689Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 18, 27, 32, 35, 41-2, 43, 60, 62, 79, 80, 98, 99, 103, 114, 135, 137, 166, 176, 179, 184, 187, 188, 233, 259, 408; CJ vii. 652a, 657a, 667b, 670b, 680a, 682a, 688a, 692b, 694a, 745b, 757b, 768a, 779a, 784a; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 123, 137, 140, 144, 155, 164, 213, 233, 236, 241; TSP vii. 676, 677; Rowe, Vane, 221; Mayers, 1659, 118, 119, 120. Both the Dutch and the French regarded him as the most important figure among that small group of councillors which handled the commonwealth’s foreign relations. No ‘minister’ on the council, insisted Antoine de Bordeaux, was ‘so well informed as he is, chiefly in regard to foreign affairs’ – which is not surprising, given that Vane received confidential reports from William Lockhart* and George Downing*, the Rump’s ambassadors in Paris and at The Hague respectively. Bordeaux, who had regular intercourse with Vane and his ‘nearest’ friends on matters of concern to the French crown, described him as ‘the principal minister in the present government’. But this, as Bordeaux himself seems to have recognised, was almost certainly an exaggeration, for in a later dispatch he referred to ‘Vane and the others who have the principal direction of foreign affairs’, suggesting that Vane’s role at Derby House was more that of primus inter pares than de facto foreign secretary.690Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 381, 399, 410, 411, 433, 435, 437, 443, 456, 462, 468, 474, 476, 483-4; TSP vii. 837; Rowe, Vane, 221-2; Mayers, 1659, 118-19, 136.

Vane’s principal collaborators in formulating the restored Rump’s foreign policy were apparently Salwey, Lambert, Whitelocke and Johnston of Wariston, though there were doubtless others.691Mayers, 1659, 119-21. The priority of this group, and certainly of Vane, was to seek stable and harmonious relations with France, the Dutch republic and the warring Baltic states of Sweden and Denmark. Vane ‘made no mystery about it’, recorded Bordeaux in July, ‘but told me plainly that the government had no desire but to live on good terms with all neighbouring states and to secure tranquillity at home, as it is convinced that it will never be respected abroad ... until its authority is firmly established in its own dominions’.692Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 437; Mayers, 1659, 122. That objective comprehended the possibility of an honourable exit to the war with Spain which Oliver Cromwell had begun in 1654, much to the detriment of English overseas trade. Little progress was made in this direction, however – largely because Vane and his friends would not countenance any peace that involved returning Jamaica.693Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 443, 489; Mayers, 1659, 141, 143. The cornerstone of their foreign policy was a renewal of the Rump’s efforts during the early 1650s to forge ‘a lasting peace and nearest union’ with the Dutch republic. But although the two powers negotiated a treaty to restore peace and free trade to the Baltic, they did not then proceed to forge that ‘near alliance’ which some of the more godly Rumpers – Vane almost certainly included – clearly desired.694CJ vii. 667b, 680a, 688a, 692a, 694a; TSP vii. 677, 734-5, 750, 765; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 393; Rowe, Vane, 221; Mayers, 1659, 130-3.

Vane was at or close to the centre of many of the political disputes that periodically disrupted the various working relationships by which the restored Rump managed – at least until the autumn – to contain the tensions within its civilian and military leadership. Some of these quarrels were brief and relatively small-scale. Early in June, for example, Vane, Ludlowe and Salwey took issue with Hesilrige, Neville and Algernon Sydney over a Commons’ order requiring army officers to attend the House to receive their commission from the hands of the Speaker. Vane and his allies opposed ‘this tactless flaunting of the army’s new subordination’, but their objections were over-ruled.695Ludlow, Mems. ii. 89; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 99; Mayers, 1659, 58. Other clashes, however, pointed to deeper cracks within the edifice of republican rule. In July, Vane exchanged ‘jealous and hot words’ with Fleetwood in the council of state over the Rump’s plans to remodel the militia, which some officers apparently suspected was part of a larger design to disband the army.696Wariston Diary, 123; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 100. In general, Vane and other ‘oligarchical republicans’ (Salwey, for example) were more sympathetic to the interests of the army, or felt less threatened by them, than those who were ‘perfectly commonwealth’s men’ – notably, Hesilrige, Ludlowe and Scot.697Mayers, 1659, 53.

Vane established particularly close links in the restored Rump with Lambert, who shared his deep commitment to complete toleration, his pro-Quaker sympathies and his preference for republican government that included a ‘select senate’ that would be co-ordinate in power with the people’s representative. This was also the model favoured by the majority of army officers. The majority of Rumpers, on the other hand, seem to have regarded the idea of a senate, and its proponents, with deep suspicion.698Supra, ‘John Lambert’; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 426; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 111-12; Mordaunt Letter-Bk. 23, 65; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 101; Woolrych, ‘The Good Old Cause’, 154-5. Vane stated his case with admirable, if impolitic, clarity in mid-June 1659, when he advised the House’s grand committee on the constitution that the public was ‘unacquainted with its own good and unfit to be trusted with power, lest they abuse it to their own ... ruin, and therefore he would have some few refined spirits ... sit at [the] helm of state together with the council till the people be made familiar with a republic and in love with it’. He used scripture to make his case for a senate, while Neville attacked it ‘without scripture’.699Nicholas Pprs. iv. 157, 161; Clarendon SP iii. 505-6; Wariston Diary, 120-1; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 106. So badly was Vane’s speech received in the House that he and Salwey were ‘deserted by many of their party’ and could now command no more than 16 or 17 votes.700TSP vii. 704. A proposal that Bordeaux claimed was made in July for appointing Vane as ambassador to the Dutch republic was

merely a pretext for removing him from England, devised by those who are jealous of his influence, which is said to have diminished since he stated, in a speech which he made in the House on the form of the government, that the people were mad and that the authority of the state ought not to be entrusted to them but to pious and holy persons, under which name he is understood to mean the sectaries of the Fifth Monarchy, to whom he preaches very regularly.701Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 424, 431.

Vane’s rapprochement with the officers did not extend to those most closely allied with the Cromwellian interest. On 5 August, for example, he was a majority teller with Neville against commissioning Edward Whalley* as a colonel of horse. The regiment in question was given instead to the staunch republican Matthew Alured*.702CJ vii. 749b.

Religious differences among the Rump’s leadership to some extent cut across the division in their ranks over how best to settle the republic’s constitution. Vane was distrusted not only by ‘pure republicans’, opposed to the idea of a senate, but also by the ‘Presbyterian party’ – that is, Rumpers such as Hesilrige who favoured an established national church and restrictions upon freedom of religious expression. One royalist newswriter claimed in July that Vane, ‘the giddy head of the confused sectaries’, was ‘outvoted by the Presbyterian members, and sometimes for no other reason but he shall take notice that he is outvoted’.703Ludlow, Mems. ii. 95; Nicholas Pprs. iv. 165; Rowe, Vane, 225. Vane’s commitment to ‘countenance and encourage all who feared the Lord under whatsoever form’ was particularly anathema to those Scots, such as Johnston of Wariston, who sought to revive the Rump’s plans of 1652-3 for a union between England and Scotland. Indeed, Vane’s refusal to accept a Presbyterian settlement in Scotland caused him, in Johnston’s view, to become ‘very froward [sic] and untoward and humorous [unpredictable] about the business of union’.704Wariston Diary, 122, 124, 126; Mayers, 1659, 174-5. At Westminster, Vane made no attempt to hide his support for those whom General George Monck* would soon dub ‘fanatics’. On 20 June, he presented a petition from Hull’s radical religious community, requesting that

the laws by which this commonwealth is to be governed may be those holy just and righteous laws of the great and wise God, our rightful lawgiver, and where any case is unprovided for in the express terms of His word, care may be taken to determine it with the most exact proportion that is possible thereto.705CJ vii. 689b; [W. Sprigge], A Modest Plea for an Equal Common-Wealth against Monarchy (1659), 74 (E.999.11).

The next day (21 June), Vane and Colonel Nathaniel Rich were majority tellers in favour of returning the House’s thanks to the petitioners, who described themselves as those ‘who, through grace, have been kept sensible of and mourned for ... the late apostasy from the good old cause’ (that is, under the protectorate).706CJ vii. 690b. His appointment to a committee set up on 1 July to consider legislation for punishing those who disturbed church services suggests that he did not approve of the Quakers’ aggressive proselytizing tactics.707CJ vii. 700b. However, he evidently supported Friends in their desire to serve in the army and other public offices, for on 14 July he was a teller in favour of appointing the prominent Bristol Quaker, Captain George Bishop, to the town’s militia commission. But although ‘seconded by Salwey and all whom his [Vane’s] power or persuasion could in any measure prevail on in the House’, he was heavily defeated by 40 votes to 20. Revealingly, his partner as teller on this occasion was the ‘irreligious’ Harringtonian, Henry Neville.708CJ vii. 717b; Bodl. Clarendon 62, f. 187. During Boothe’s rebellion in August, Vane accepted the honorary command of a volunteer regiment of horse raised by London’s ‘Congregated churches’ – a commission that was renewed in November.709Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 49; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 94, 101-11, 121, 131, 156; Clarke Pprs. iv. 42; Whitelocke, Diary, 541; Rowe, Vane, 225.

The response of the Rump’s leaders to Boothe’s rebellion had the effect of exposing, and therefore widening, their divisions. Reacting to the evidence of disloyalty among the militia that the rebellion had exposed, Hesilrige demanded the imposition of a new engagement ‘to be true, faithful, and constant to this commonwealth, against any king, single person and House of Peers and every of them’.710CJ vii. 774a; Mayers, 1659, 231. When this oath was presented for subscription to MPs early in September, it was reported that ‘the greatest heats that could be in words’ had passed between Hesilrige and Vane and that the two men had come near to blows.711Wariston Diary, 134, 135; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 207. Vane did not object to the sentiments expressed in the oath, but he was apparently concerned that it would ‘divide and discourage the ‘well-affected’ in the army’ and meet with outright refusal from Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. In other words, Vane seems to have suspected the oath would be used by Hesilrige and his friends as the basis for purging their opponents from the army and public office.712Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 478; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 110; Mayers, 1659, 231-2. In the event, the engagement was referred on 6 September to a committee, to which Vane was named first, and there it was allowed to drop.713CJ vii. 774b; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 474.

The engagement dispute deepened the commonwealth’s divisions, such that ‘on major political and religious questions, members of the government began to cluster round opposite poles represented by Hesilrige and Vane’.714Mayers, 1659, 233; Mordaunt Letter-Bk. 65. Bordeaux thought the Rump and army was divided into two factions, ‘one of the true republicans who are reputed Presbyterians and the other of the Anabaptists and millenarians or Saints, [and] that the former party prevails in the Parliament and that the other ... has on its side the majority of the officers of the army’.715Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 485-6. Johnston of Wariston was describing a similar divide when he noted that Hesilrige’s ‘party is more for ordinances [church discipline] and against Quakers, but less for godly men, and Sir Henry Vane more for godly men but less for ordinances’.716Wariston Diary, 139.

Against this background of rising political tensions at Westminster, the Rump returned to the vexed question of the constitution, setting up a committee on 8 September 1659 – to which Vane was again named first – ‘in order to the settlement of the government of this commonwealth’.717CJ vii. 775b. It was probably in an attempt to influence this committee’s deliberations that the Fifth Monarchists petitioned the Commons in mid-September calling for ‘perpetual rule by an oligarchy of Saints dedicated to establishing the kingdom of Christ’. The rumour reported by Bordeaux that Vane ‘got up this address’ is probably untrue, but there may be substance to his claim that Vane and the army officers were pushing for ‘a council of 40 persons of their own way of thinking, who shall have entire authority in the state and a veto on the resolutions of the Parliament, under the pretext that if the people were at full liberty they would restore the king’. He was certainly correct in asserting that the ‘faction of true republicans’ – that is, Hesilrige’s party – ‘will strongly oppose this establishment’.718An Essay Toward Settlement upon a Sure Foundation (1659, 669 f.23.73); Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 474-5; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 111-12.

Hostility between Vane’s and Hesilrige’s factions in the Rump flared into the open again in response to a petition that Lambert’s army, on its march home after suppressing Boothe’s rebellion, had drawn up at Derby, expressing frustration at the Rump’s failure to redress the army’s grievances since its restoration in May. The petitioners demanded, among other things, the establishment of a select senate and Lambert’s promotion to major-general.719Baker, Chronicle, 655-6; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 118; Wariston Diary, 137; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 112-13; Mayers, 1659, 237. When the petition was presented to the House on 22 September 1659, Hesilrige led a clamour to commit Lambert to the Tower for high treason in endeavouring to raise a party against Parliament.720Ludlow, Mems. ii. 124, 134-5; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 483; Whitelocke, Diary, 532; Wariston Diary, 137-8; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 113. But Vane, Fleetwood and their allies persuaded the House against branding the petition ‘of dangerous consequence’ and that Lambert deserved the benefit of the doubt.721CJ vii. 785; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 135; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 113. According to Bordeaux, Vane and his friends argued that

the government had no other friends or supporters either at home or abroad [besides the army], and it would be exposed to utter ruin by offending them; that the principal officers were not to be blamed for the faults of their inferiors and that Mr [sic] Lambert had not deserved such bad treatment but rather ought to be rewarded for the services he has rendered during so many years.722Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 483.

A week or so later, Johnston reported that Hesilrige had delivered a tirade against Vane in the council of state, shouting ‘that he [Vane] would ruin the nation’ and desiring ‘never to come in the place where he was’. For his part, Vane confided to Johnston that he suspected that a proposal to widen the Rump’s political base by holding recruiter elections was a design by Hesilrige for ‘settling the government as Sir Arthur would have it’.723Wariston Diary, 139; Mayers, 1659, 243. The ‘true republicans’ were also pressing for a settlement in which ‘the civil magistrate shall have a corrective power in matters of religion’.724Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 490. Despite Vane’s fear that he was losing political ground to Hesilrige, the deliberations of the committee set up on 8 September to consider the constitution were beginning to fall into line by early October with a ‘new model of government’ that Vane had proposed to the committee’s chairman, Whitelocke. This constitutional blueprint proposed that the ‘supreme power’ should be restrained in ‘some fundamentals’ and, specifically, that it should not be permitted ‘to erect matters of faith or worship so as to exercise compulsion therein’.725The Remonstrance and Protestation of the Well-affected People of...England (1659), 4; Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 29-30; Mayers, 1659, 241-2.

Defeat, imprisonment and execution, 1659-62

Vane and Salwey may have been cautiously optimistic by early October 1659 that an acceptable constitutional settlement could be reached so long as providence did not ‘again break Parliament by the army’.726Wariston Diary, 140. The Rump’s initially eirenic response to a petition presented to it from the council of officers on 5 October – which re-iterated the army’s demands of 13 May and vindicating the Derby petitioners – seemed to bear out Vane’s hope that MPs might ‘not take so much offence at what the army did but settle the government with their consent’.727True Narrative, 4-8; Wariston Diary, 139; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 114-15; Mayers, 1659, 244-8. On 10 October, he was named to one of several committees that the House set up to prepare an answer to the officers’ proposals.728CJ vii. 794b. But then on 11 October came the revelation that Lambert, Disbrowe and other officers had been canvassing signatures to the 5 October petition from army units throughout the three commonwealths – ‘an exercise in blatant military pressure’.729Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 115. The next day (12 Oct.), Hesilrige and other militant republicans – emboldened by a secret offer of support from Monck in Scotland – led the Commons in voting to cashier the nine officers and vest supreme command in seven commissioners, among them Hesilrige, Ludlowe and Monck (but not Vane).730CJ vii. 796a; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 116; Mayers, 1659, 248-50. This was an open challenge to the disaffected officers and was taken as such. That evening, Lambert called out the regiments loyal to him – the majority – and surrounded the forces that Hesilrige and his allies had hastily deployed to defend Westminster. The ‘siege’ ended on 13 October, when the council of state ordered all soldiers to withdraw to quarters. The troops loyal to Hesilrige and his allies obeyed this command, but Lambert and Fleetwood effectively ignored it and their troops promptly took possession of the Parliament-House.731Supra, ‘John Lambert’; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 116-17; Mayers, 1659, 250-1.

In the immediate aftermath of the restored Rump’s dissolution, the army grandees attempted to reach a compromise with Hesilrige’s faction on the basis of the Rump annulling its inflammatory anti-army votes of 11 and 12 October 1659. In the council of state, Vane proposed a plan whereby the army would allow the Rump to re-assemble on 1 December and, in the interim, the council would consider the army’s grievances and present them to the House when it reconvened. Although probably dismayed by the dissolution of the Rump, he interpreted the army’s actions as ‘an introduction to the glorious appearance of the kingdom of God’. His friend Salwey was less sanguine, however.732Wariston Diary, 145-6, 149-50; Mayers, 1659, 258. And Hesilrige’s faction responded by demanding an instant, unconditional restoration of the Rump, which was to place an insuperable barrier in the way of any settlement.733Wariston Diary, 146; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 118-19; Mayers, 1659, 254-5. On 15 October, the council of officers appointed a ten-man committee that included Fleetwood, Lambert, Vane, Salwey and Johnston to consider ‘fit ways and means to carry on the affairs and government of the commonwealth’.734True Narrative, 21; Wariston Diary, 146; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 143; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 119.

Vane had acquiesced in the October 1659 coup partly because he shared Lambert’s conviction that the best interests of the army and the sects lay in the creation of a select senate co-ordinate in power with Parliament – probably something very close to the blueprint for constitutional settlement that Vane’s protégé and friend Henry Stubbe published that October, A Letter to an Officer of the Army Concerning a Select Senate.735H. Stubbe, A Letter to an Officer of the Army Concerning a Select Senate (1659, E.1000.8); Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 126-8. By 22 October, the committee of ten and the council of officers had agreed on an interim government under a new executive, the ‘committee of safety’, to which Lambert, Vane, Salwey, Whitelocke and 19 others were appointed on 26 October.736Wariston Diary, 147-8; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 131; True Narrative, 41. Vane and his republican allies disputed the committee’s composition, however, and evidently doubted whether it was lawfully constituted. They ‘desired to be excused till such time as the common cause might be secured to the satisfaction of good men’.737Ludlow, Mems. ii. 143-4; Clarke Pprs. iv. 93; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, ii. 281, 281-2; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 131-2; Mayers, 1659, 265-6. However, Vane and Salwey agreed to serve the new regime in their capacity as admiralty commissioners.738Ludlow, Mems. ii. 157; Cogar, ‘Naval Administration’, 236. More significantly, Vane, Salwey, Whitelocke, Ludlowe and others consented to sit on a sub-committee of the committee of safety ‘to consider of a form of government for the three nations’. Ludlowe claimed that although some members of this sub-committee ‘were very unwilling to have any part in an affair of this nature, yet seeing we were now under the power and government of the sword we resolved to procure the best settlement we could get’ or, failing that, ‘the regulation of what was most amiss’.739Ludlow, Mems. ii. 149; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, ii. 284. Once again, Vane produced the draft of a constitution that would guarantee ‘vast toleration and [the] magistrates’ seclusion from meddling in religious matters’, and, once again, he was opposed by Johnston, who pleaded instead for Presbyterian church discipline and a confession of faith.740Wariston Diary, 150-1, 152; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 132-3. To Whitelocke, who took part in these constitutional deliberations, it seemed that Vane was ‘hard to be satisfied’ and ‘did much stick to his own apprehensions’.741Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 376.

With Lambert’s departure late in October 1659 to confront Monck on the Anglo-Scottish border, Vane lost his leading ally among the army officers, and with the opening of treaty talks between Monck and the committee of safety he ‘gave both army and Parliament [up] for lost’.742Ludlow, Mems. ii. 160; Wariston Diary, 153. In Lambert’s absence, the army grandees showed more interest in courting the puritan legal and clerical establishment than in paying heed to Vane and his ‘new refined government’ – that is, his proposals for constitutional reform. By early December, he was talking of retiring from public affairs, ‘as his advice is no longer followed’.743Ludlow, Mems. ii. 161, 164; Clarke Pprs. iv. 300; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, ii. 293, 304; Clarendon SP iii. 620; CCSP iv. 457; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 148; Mayers, 1659, 264, 270. Nevertheless, when news reached London in mid-December that the fleet had declared for the restitution of the Rump, Vane and Salwey, along with Edward Salmon*, agreed to mediate between the committee of safety and Vice-admiral John Lawson*, the commander of the Channel fleet. Vane and Salwey were confident that ‘they had keeped themselves free and so might agree [i.e. broker an agreement between] both parties’. But Lawson and his advisors (who included Scot and John Okey*) thought that they had adhered too closely to the army and had therefore betrayed the public interest.744Ludlow, Mems. ii. 180-1; Wariston Diary, 171; G. Penn, Memorials of Sir William Penn (1833), ii. 186-91; G. Davies, The Restoration of Charles II (Oxford, 1955), 183-4.

His mission to win over Lawson a failure, Vane returned to Whitehall in time to witness the collapse of the committee of safety and the recall, on 24 December 1659, of the Rump.745Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 382. He was named to one committee in the re-restored Rump – set up on 27 December for continuing the customs and excise – but soon thereafter he seems to have withdrawn from the House.746CJ vii. 797b; Wariston Diary, 164. Having resumed his seat on 9 January 1660 on the order of the Commons, he came under a barrage of criticism, principally from Hesilrige’s faction, for his complicity in the rule of the committee of safety – which was attested with reference to his activities in October and November as an admiralty commissioner. Notwithstanding his ‘ingenious answer’ to these charges, the House voted that he be discharged as a Member and ordered him to confine himself to Raby Castle.747CJ vii. 805b, 806; Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 388; Wariston Diary, 164. Salwey, his ‘second in most things’, was also disabled from sitting any longer in the House.748TSP i. 767.

Belatedly recognising the folly of dividing the republican interest in the face of potent enemies, Hesilrige had begun to repent his hard line against the Lambertonians even before Vane’s expulsion from the House on 9 January 1659.749Supra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’. Indeed, according to one report ‘he wept when he saw he could not hinder it’.750Bodl. Clarendon 68, f. 146. A royalist observer, writing in mid-January, claimed that Hesilrige and Neville were now trying to have Vane restored to his seat in order to prop up the tottering republican interest, ‘but all will not do, and therefore he [Vane] disowns them for a Parliament, believing his being of it essential to its constitution’.751Clarendon SP iii. 650. Pleading ‘indisposition of health’, Vane remained in London, whereupon the House, anxious to curry favour with Monck, passed several orders for taking Vane into custody and conveying him to Belleau ‘in order to his going to his house at Raby’.752CJ vii. 828b, 835a, 841b; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 217, 220, 221; Rowe, Vane, 231-2. It was said of Vane at this time that he had the misfortune to lie ‘under the most catholic [i.e. universal] prejudice’ of any man known.753TSP i. 767.

In June 1660, the Convention voted to exempt Vane from the Act of Indemnity as to his estate, and early in July he and Hesilrige were arrested on the ‘pretext that they had endeavoured to persuade divers officers of the army to form a party in order to oppose the present power’. When the Lords demanded that Vane, Hesilrige and Lambert be exempted as to life as well as estate, the Commons agreed but on the understanding that the two Houses would petition the king that the men, being non-regicides, should be spared execution if they were tried – to which petition, Charles duly assented.754LJ xi. 114a, 136b, 143b, 156b, 163a; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 289-90, 291, 293-4, 340; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’. Imprisoned in the Tower and then on the Scilly Isles, Vane devoted his time largely to writing the several theological treatises and meditations that were published after his death. The import of these works was that the true Saints should not despair but look to the ‘near approaching day of the Lord’ to vindicate and fulfill their expectations. The good old cause had suffered merely a temporary check, he argued, because it was ‘not so prudently and righteously managed as it might and ought to have been’.755Vane, Two Treatises (1662); Vane, An Epistle General to the Mystical Body of Christ on Earth (1662); Vane, A Pigrimage into the Land of Promise 1664); Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’. ‘This dark night and black shade which God hath drawn over His work in the midst of us may be (for ought we know) the ground-colour to some beautiful piece that He is exposing to the light’.756Vane, Two Treatises, 95, 99.

The Cavalier Parliament, more vengeful than the Convention, decreed that as Vane and Lambert had been excepted from the Act of Indemnity they should be proceeded against according to law.757Ludlow, Voyce, 291-2. In consequence, both men were tried for high treason in June 1662, using a team of prosecuting lawyers that included Vane’s old Presbyterian and royalist foes Sir John Maynard*, Geoffrey Palmer* and Glynne. At his trial in king’s bench on 6 June, Vane defended himself against the charge that his career in the Rump had constituted treason against Charles II, by insisting upon the supreme authority of Parliament as the guardian of ‘the common good and necessity of the kingdom’. Having loyally served ‘the principles of that righteous cause’, he argued, he had been a true servant to the kingdom and to the office, if not necessarily the person, of the king. Besides deploying natural law arguments – necessity and the notion of parliamentary sovereignty in time of national crisis – he appealed to Magna Carta, the common law and to the ‘liberty and privileges of an Englishman’. He clearly believed, probably with good cause, that his case had been prejudiced by legal irregularities (including tampering with the jury) and therefore that he had been denied that most basic of English liberties – a fair trial.

Vane’s defence at his trial does not entirely accord with Ludlowe’s account of proceedings in which the accused is portrayed as a noble defender of the supreme authority of the House of Commons.758Ludlow, Voyce, 311-12. In fact, Vane, at times, showed considerable respect for pre-revolutionary readings of the ancient constitution and particularly for the concept of a legally-bounded monarchy and of the two Houses as co-ordinate with the king in law-making but as the supreme judges in all matters of controversy between him and the people. Parliament, according to Vane, was guardian of the constitution and could legitimately use force in order to restrain tyranny – a doctrine that rendered the two Houses or their agents immune from charges of treason. Among the sources that Vane drew on here was His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions (1642) and, more directly, its radical rejoinder A Political Catechism (1643). As in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, he employed the term ‘the people’ not with reference to the true Saints but to the commons of England as represented at Westminster.759Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, passim; Rowe, Vane, 234-9; Parnham, Vane, 34; Weston, Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns, 154-7.

Vane’s rendition of the constitution may not have been the republican tour de force that Ludlowe described, but it was sufficiently radical to alarm Charles II. The day after the trial, the king informed Lord Chancellor Clarendon that ‘Sir Henry Vane’s carriage yesterday ... was so insolent as to justify all he had done, acknowledging no supreme power in England but a Parliament ... certainly he is too dangerous a man to let live if we can honestly put him out of the way’.760State Trials, v. 187-8. Given that a guilty verdict was inevitable, Vane virtually condemned himself by his steadfast refusal to profess remorse or to cast himself upon the king’s mercy. Ludlowe claimed that while Vane ‘pleaded for the life of his country and the liberties thereof’, Lambert pleaded merely for his life, ‘lessening and excusing’ his alleged wrongdoings.761Ludlow, Voyce, 311. Both men were duly convicted of high treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, but the king commuted Vane’s sentence to beheading and Lambert’s to imprisonment.762Supra, ‘John Lambert’; Rowe, Vane, 239-41.

Vane apparently showed a ‘noble and Christian-like deportment’ during his final hours, displaying great composure, even cheerfulness, in the face of death, sure in the conviction that ‘this cause shall have its resurrection in my death. My blood will be the seed sown by which this glorious cause will spring up which God will speedily raise’. His speech from the scaffold on Tower Hill on 14 June (the anniversary of Naseby) was to have concluded with this very sentiment, but he was prevented from finishing it by the sheriff.763Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 79-80, 82-92; Ludlow, Voyce, 312-13. He was buried in the family vault at Shipborne, Kent, on 15 June.764Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, ii. 123. During his trial he referred to the ‘great debts’ he had incurred during his time in public life and to the ‘destitute condition my many children are in as to any provision made for them’.765Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 46. His family was allowed to keep Raby Castle, Fairlawn and most of his other properties, but Belleau was returned to the earl of Lindsey.766CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 409, 437; Rowe, Vane, 242.

Final assessment

Vane’s speech from the scaffold, had he been allowed to finish it, would have praised the Scottish Covenanter leader Archibald Campbell*, marquess of Argyll, who had been executed for treason in Scotland the year before. ‘That noble person, whose memory I honour, was with myself at the beginning and making of the Solemn League and Covenant; the matter of which, and the holy ends therein contained, I fully assent unto and have been as desirous to observe’.767Tryal of Sir Henry Vane, 91. Vane was above all a conviction politician; he needed the challenge of a noble cause in order to achieve his full potential as a statesman. He evidently shared the hopes of many godly zealots, in England as well as in Scotland, that the Covenant would become an instrument for God’s larger purposes for His people in Britain and across Europe, and he was probably genuinely dismayed when narrow differences over church discipline frustrated those broader ‘holy ends’.768Harl. 165, f. 214v; CJ iii. 317a-b; A.I. Macinnes, The British Confederate: Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, 1607-61 (Edinburgh, 2011), 164-5, 193-4. In serving such a cause, Vane was quite capable of dissimulation and other sharp political practice. Argyll’s close collaborator Archibald Johnston of Wariston had Vane principally in mind when he wrote of those ‘nimble, witty, untender men’ who dominated the English Parliament’s counsels. Indeed, by late 1659, Vane had become, in Johnston’s eyes, ‘Achitophel’ (King David’s devious counsellor), whose ‘politic, deceitful, double, false way’ had brought ruin to the commonwealth.769Wariston Diary, 127, 164, 171.

Without a great and righteous cause to animate him – as the years immediately following the rupture between the Independents and the Scots in 1644-5 would reveal – Vane was a wayward and, in some respects, isolated figure at Westminster. The Scottish intellectual and friend of Hartlib, John Dury, criticised Vane in August 1646 as ‘not wise as a right statesman should be. He should accept of proffers and find out ways to bind those that make them to perfomance’.770Hartlib Pprs. Online, 3/3/26B. Even Vane’s fellow Independent grandees had reservations about sharing their most secret designs with him, and they apparently did not trust him to draft important legislation and declarations. He needed the challenge in 1649 of creating a godly republic and, in 1656-9, of rallying the true Saints and commonwealthsmen against Cromwellian tyranny to re-establish him as an innovative and yet, at the same time, practical political thinker and actor. The influence of his ideas on the development of republicanism on both sides of the Atlantic has been held up as perhaps his most enduring legacy.771Rowe, Vane, 259-60; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane, the younger’. That said, few if any men made a greater contribution to England’s emergence as a naval power in the mid-seventeenth century than Sir Henry Vane the younger.772Rowe, Vane, 257-9.