VANE (FANE), Sir Henry I (1589-1655), of Fairlawn, Shipbourne, Kent; Northumberland Ct., St Martin-in-the Fields, Westminster; and Raby Castle, co. Dur.

The judgement of history

Sir Henry Vane I has suffered the double misfortune of attracting general opprobrium during his lifetime and very little attention after it. Overshadowed well before his death by his brilliant and mercurial eldest son Sir Henry Vane II*, he has quietly been relegated from the front rank of parliamentary politicians as surely as he fell from royal favour. His consignment to the margins of civil-war history owes less, perhaps, to the number of his detractors – Vane II had far more – than the paucity of his admirers.135TSP i. 767. No one after 1640 seems to have had a good word for him. His work as a royal adviser and household officer during the 1630s was said in 1641 to have raised ‘great hatred’ of him among his fellow courtiers.136HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 367. And when the king stripped him of his offices 11 months later it was reported that Vane had the ‘ill luck to be neither loved nor pitied of any man’.137CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 189. His reputation then took a battering from the pens of civil-war polemicists – most notably that of the Leveller leader John Lilburne, who alleged that he had betrayed the king in the Short Parliament and county Durham to the royalists in 1642. That ‘old, tyrannical monopolizer Sir Henry Vane’ was deemed ‘by all men that I can talk with that knows him and his practices ... a man as full of guilt (in the highest nature) and court baseness as any man whatever’.138J. Lilburne, The Resolved Mans Resolution (1647), 13-19 (E.387.4); Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 17 (4-11 Jan. 1648), sig. R3 (E.422.17); Vox Veritatis (1650), 9-10 (E.616.6). The royalists held him in equal contempt. Sir Philip Warwick* accounted him ‘a man of no clear head’ and the mere ‘creature’ of the queen and other court grandees.139Warwick, Mems. Charles I (1701), 134-5, 141. For Sir Edward Hyde* (the future earl of Clarendon), Vane was in many ways the archetypal rotten courtier, whose self-interest and pusillanimity did so much to weaken royal authority in the face of unscrupulous opponents.140Clarendon, Hist. i. 83, 340, 430; ii. 548-9. Hyde thought him not only corrupt but incompetent – ‘illiterate’ – although it is clear from Vane’s diplomatic dispatches that he was an assured penman and was fluent in French and probably Dutch as well.141Harl. 166, f. 98; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 548. Abroad, too, he seems to have made a poor impression. A Scottish agent in Swedish service in the mid-1640s reminded his masters of the insidious ‘arts and tricks’ that Vane had employed during his embassy to Gustavus Adolphus in 1631-2.142Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet), Stockholm, AOSB SER B.: Hugh Mowatt to Oxenstierna, 31 Jan. 1645; J.R. Young, ‘The Scottish Parliament and European diplomacy 1641-7’, in Scotland and the Thirty Years’ War 1618-48 ed. S. Murdoch (Leiden, 2001), 93.

This generally low opinion of Vane’s character has lent substance to the insinuations of Hyde and others that he was motivated purely by greed and malice and therefore beneath consideration as a serious political player.143Clarendon, Hist. i. 161, 182; ii. 549; G. C. Rogers, ‘Sir Henry Vane, junior – Spirit Mystic and Fanatic Democrat’ (Chicago Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1953), 49. Thus he merits only one, brief, mention in S. R. Gardiner’s now venerable but still influential account of the civil war.144Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, i. 306. Fortunately, however, there are signs that this dismissive attitude to Vane might be changing, and there is certainly considerable evidence to suggest that far from being the ‘inefficient, self-seeking courtier’ of general repute, he was a skillful politician who managed, against considerable odds, to balance a successful career in the service of Charles I and a commitment to transforming England into Europe’s greatest Protestant power.145CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. xxxii; Mems. of Prince Rupert, i. 173; Gardiner, Hist. England 1603-42, ix. 87; M. Smuts, ‘Force, love and authority in Caroline political culture’, in The 1630s ed. I. Atherton, J. Sanders (Manchester, 2006), 43-4; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane’.

Background and early career

Vane was descended from a junior branch of a family that had settled at Tunbridge, Kent, by the mid-fifteenth century.146Collins, Peerage, iii. 283-4; W.V.R. Fane, ‘The ped. of the Fane and Vane fam.’, The Gen. n.s. xiii. 82, 85-6. His grandfather, Henry Fane†, had inherited from his cousin Sir Ralph Fane† (MP for Orford, Suffolk, in 1547) the manor of Hadlow – which became the family’s main residence – and the manor of Shipbourne, parcel of the dissolved monastery of Dartford.147Hasted, Kent, v. 47-8; Collins, Peerage, iii. 284-6; HP Commons 1509-1558. Henry Fane†, a thorough-going Protestant, had been involved in Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary I in 1554 and had represented Winchelsea, in Sussex, in the first two Elizabethan Parliaments.148Collins, Peerage, v. 500-2; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Henry Fane I’. His son and namesake (Vane I’s father) had also been a convinced Protestant, and after representing the Kentish borough of Hythe in the 1593 Parliament he had served as an officer in the English army sent to Normandy to assist Henri IV against the Spanish.149HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Henry Fane II’. The day before his death at Rouen in 1596, Fane had made a devoutly godly will in which he had described himself as ‘a most grievous and penitent sinner’.150PROB11/89, f. 342v.

Vane I was still a minor when his father died, and his wardship was purchased by his mother.151WARD9/158, f. 195v. He received a gentleman’s education at Oxford and Gray’s Inn, polished, no doubt, by a sojourn on the continent in 1608, and in his 23rd year (so he tells us) he married a wealthy Essex heiress.152Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, ii. 113. His wife, to whom he seems to have remained entirely faithful (no mean achievement for a Jacobean and Caroline courtier), bore him 16 children. In his will, he would refer to the ‘true, firm and constant love that hath always been between me and my said wife’.153PROB11/245, f. 422; Shipbourne Par. Regs. ed. Crisp, 35, 37-42, 44-5, 47. Flush with the money from his wife’s dowry, he decided to ‘to put myself into court and bought a carver’s place by means of the friendship of Sir Thomas Overbury, which cost me £5,000’. The following year, he purchased a third part of the subpoena office in chancery for £3,250 and was later granted the reversion of the entire office by King James.154Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, ii. 113. His court offices as carver and joint-master of the subpoena office were together worth about £1,100 a year.155Aylmer, King’s Servants, 85-6.

In 1614, Vane was returned for the Cornish borough of Lostwithiel – probably through the patronage of the court grandee William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, who was lord warden of the Stannaries.156HP Commons 1604-1629. Vane would be elected for Lostwithiel again in 1621 and 1625 but opted to sit for Carlisle, where he almost certainly owed his return to the locally-influential peer Henry Lord Clifford†.157HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Carlisle’; J.K. Gruenfelder, Influence in Early Stuart Elections (Columbus, 1981), 166. Vane’s activities at Westminster during the early 1620s earned him a reputation as one of the ‘principal men that upon all occasions stand up for the king [James I]’.158Harl. 1580, f. 168v; Collins, Peerage, v. 506-7; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir Henry Vane (Fane)’.

In about 1615, Vane sold his estate at Hadlow and with the proceeds bought the nearby manor of Fairlawn for £4,000.159Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, ii. 114. Not long after the establishment in 1616 of the household of the prince of Wales (the future Charles I), Vane bought the office of cofferer, and in 1623 he was included by Charles among the servants he wished to attend him in Madrid.160Chamberlain Lttrs. ed. McClure, ii. 58; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane’. Vane supported the Spanish match, but rather than go to Spain he remained in England and took on the responsibility of ordering and refurbishing the prince’s court apartments and chapel in anticipation of Charles’s return with the Infanta. The familiar tone of his correspondence with Charles suggests that he was liked and trusted by the prince. It also reveals an appreciation of, perhaps even a taste for, the ornate – and to puritan eyes ‘popish’ – trappings of worship that Charles favoured.161Harl. 1581, f. 260; CSP Ven. 1628-9, p. 593; 1629-32, p. 141. There is no firm evidence to support claims that Vane had incurred the severe displeasure of the royal favourite, George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, over the Spanish match and had thus been forced to live ‘for a long while’ in Holland.162Harl. 1581, f. 260; CSP Ven. 1629-32, p. 354; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 548-9; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane’.

Vane’s election in 1624 for Beverley, where the borough’s leading landowner was the duchy of Cornwall, strongly suggests that he still enjoyed the favour of both Charles and the duke (having also been returned for Carlisle, Vane again opted to sit for the Cumberland constituency).163HP Common, 1604-1629, ‘Beverley’, ‘Sir Henry Vane (Fane)’; Gruenfelder, Influence in Early Stuart Elections, 94, 95. If he did fall out of favour with Buckingham in the mid-1620s the cause was probably his close friendship with the lord treasurer – and the duke’s bête noir in the 1624 Parliament – Lionel Cranfield†, 1st earl of Middlesex.164Nicholas Debates 1621, ii. 122. Vane’s stock recovered, or rose even higher, with Charles’s accession in 1625, when it was reported that he had been ‘lately received into my lord duke’s [Buckingham’s] favour and love, and [he] hath long been well rooted in the king’s heart and hath a world of great and fast friends in this court’.165SP16/1/67, f. 96; CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 10. One of these ‘great’ friends, it seems, was Thomas Howard, 14th or 21st earl of Arundel – his likely patron in the 1628 elections, when he was returned for the Howard stronghold of Thetford, in Norfolk. It was possibly through Arundel that Vane became an ally or client of the earl’s friend Sir Richard Weston†, who replaced Cranfield as lord treasurer.166SP16/211/18, f. 23; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir Henry Vane (Fane)’, ‘Sir Richard Weston’.

Although of little political consequence, Vane’s office as joint cofferer of the king’s household was lucrative, and in 1626-9 he was able to purchase Barnard and Raby Castles (which he had leased from the crown since 1616) and other royal demesne property in county Durham for upwards of £18,000.167Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, ii. 113-14; Surtees, Co. Dur. iv. 166. His eagerness to build a large new estate in the north was of a piece with his decision at some point during the later 1620s to revert to the medieval spelling of his surname, ‘Vane’, in an effort (common among peers and gentlemen of the period) to highlight the gothic antiquity of his lineage.168Collins, Peerage, v. 505. One of his cousins, Sir Francis Fane†, had married an heiress of the great medieval Marcher family the Nevills and had taken their title, the earl of Westmorland, and Vane was keen to make a similar statement of his own.169CP xii. 565; Collins, Peerage, v. 505; Fane, ‘Ped. of the Fane and Vane fam.’, 85-6. It was no coincidence that the Nevills’ chief residence had been Raby Castle. The purpose behind Vane’s purchases, therefore, was not simply to augment the family’s estate but also to re-affirm its ancient, baronial lineage and chivalric credentials. Indeed, he apparently aspired to underline his family’s noble antiquity in even more vaunted fashion – by securing a peerage for himself as baron of Raby to go with his castle, ‘since it hath pleased God, with his Majesty’s favour, to cast my lot in this northern climate’.170CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 436; P. Heylyn, Observations on the Historie of the Reign of King Charles (1656), 228; Nicholas Pprs. i. 55. Which is not to imply that financial considerations were absent from Vane’s calculations. He was keen, for example, to break into county Durham’s lucrative coal business, which he succeeded in doing in the summer of 1639 when he was granted a royal licence to build ‘a wharf or quay’ at South Shields, on the River Tyne, that was ‘a fit and convenient place for ships to cast ballast at’ and therefore a ‘great furtherance of [the coal] trade’. The following year he purchased a colliery near Raby Castle.171SO3/12, f. 55; R. Gardiner, Englands Grievance Discovered, in Relation to the Coal-trade (1655), 50-1; Rowe, Vane, 3-4; Howell, Newcastle, 305.

Embassies to and Gustavus Adolphus

Charles I demonstrated his trust and regard for Vane by appointing him ambassador extraordinary to the United Provinces in the spring of 1625. The precise nature of his mission is not known, but it evidently involved conveying Charles’s re-assurances to his sister, the queen of Bohemia, of his continuing commitment to recovering the Palatinate.172CSP Dom. 1625-6, pp. 8, 400; M.A.E. Green, Elizabeth Electress Palatine and Queen of Bohemia (1909), 244. Vane would become one of the queen’s English correspondents, but she never entirely trusted him as she did Sir Thomas Rowe* and Sir Richard Cave*.173Corresp. of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia ed. N. Akkerman (Oxford, 2011), ii. 61, 68, 74, 173, 193, 387; CSP Dom. 1625-49, xviii. Vane was dispatched by Charles to the United Provinces again in the spring of 1629, but this time as a special envoy and with the difficult task of trying to persuade the prince of Orange (Frederik Hendrik, the Dutch stadtholder), the elector and the queen of Bohemia – and anyone else of influence in the republic who would listen – of the king’s bona fides in seeking peace with Spain on terms that repudiated the Anglo-Dutch alliance of 1625 and that made no firm provision for the restitution of the Palatinate.174SP84/139, ff. 60-2; CSP Ven. 1628-9, pp. 592-3; 1629-32, pp. xlii, 2, 12, 24, 44; Green, Elizabeth Electress Palatine, 271-2; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane’; A. Poot, Crucial Years in Anglo-Dutch Relations (1625-42) (Hilversum, 2013), 82-3; Bonham’s sale, London 16 Mar. 2016, Lot 198: Charles I to the queen of Bohemia, n.d.

After returning to England for consultations at court, Vane was sent back to The Hague in October 1629 as an extraordinary ambassador to ensure that in seeking its own peace with Spain the United Provinces remained committed to the cause of restoring the Palatinate and did not move into closer conjunction with the French. In the event, Vane achieved nothing beyond ensuring that Charles’s overtures to the Spanish did not lead to an open rupture with his Dutch allies.175SP84/140, ff. 101-112v; SP84/141, f. 284; CSP Ven. 1629-32, pp. xlii, 273, 287, 387, 401; Gardiner, Hist. England 1603-42, vii. 108, 170, 173; L.J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge, 1989), 260; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane’; Poot, Anglo-Dutch Relations, 90-6. At the conclusion of his embassy, Vane was assured by the leading courtier James Hay, 1st earl of Carlisle that ‘both his master [the king] and friends [at court] are very well satisfied and acknowledge his dexterity, zeal and judgement’.176CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 361; 1625-49, p. 337. By way of reward for his diplomatic endeavours he was made comptroller of the king’s household in 1629 and appointed a privy councillor in the summer of 1630, when he described by Rowe as ‘of the cabinet and one of those that can read whispers [at court]’.177CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 306; CSP Ven. 1629-32, p. 354.

Where Vane himself stood on the issues of the Palatinate and the Protestant cause was a matter of some speculation in diplomatic circles. The Venetian ambassador to England thought Vane a ‘worthy man’ and a ‘man of sound sense’ – i.e. a friend of the Dutch and the anti-Spanish cause – but reported suspicions that he was secretly acting for the strongly Hispanophile, and highly influential, Lord Treasurer Weston (Sir Richard Weston†).178CSP Ven. 1628-9, p. 593; 1629-32, pp. 44, 354. Vane was certainly a dependant or ally of the lord treasurer and was well insinuated with the Spanish faction at court – he would probably not have been appointed ambassador otherwise. But claims that he owed his court offices primarily to Weston’s influence remain unsubstantiated.179T. Birch, The Ct. and Times of Charles the First (1848), ii. 25; CSP Dom. 1625-49, pp. 337, 368; CSP Ven. 1629-32, pp. 347-8, 354, 359, 555; CD 1629, 242; Gardiner, Hist. England 1603-42, vii. 188; Reeve, Personal Rule, 182, 260-1; K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), 82; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane’. As a man of relatively modest estate and background, Vane doubtless needed all the friends at court he could get – and there were few more powerful than Weston. Much of his unofficial correspondence during his embassy, however, had been with figures of a decidedly more Protestant and anti-Spanish stamp, including Francis Russell†, 4th earl of Bedford, William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, Henry Rich†, 1st earl of Holland, and Adam Harsnett, the Calvinist archbishop of York.180SP16/211/18, f. 23; SP84/141, f. 3; CSP Dom. 1629-31, pp. 97, 120, 159, 167, 311, 372, 514; 1625-49, p. 436. Moreover, the impression of those who observed his proceedings in the Low Countries was that he distrusted Madrid’s intentions, wished to maintain the Dutch alliance and was distinctly uncomfortable at what looked like Charles’s abandonment of the Palatinate. In his despatches home he was careful to stick to the Caroline script, but he was also willing to report lengthy criticism of Charles’s pro-Spanish leanings from the prince of Orange and the elector palatine.181SP84/139, ff. 70v-71, 71v-72, 136; SP84/141, ff. 25v-26v; CSP Ven. 1629-32, pp. 141, 406, 354. He undoubtedly took a more pragmatic line on foreign policy than the likes of Rowe. But he was not, as some have claimed both then and since, a mere instrument of the Spanish faction.182CSP Ven. 1629-32, p. 401; Reeve, Personal Rule, 260-1, 261-2. He did not relish the prospect of peace with France and Spain in 1629, for as he told Carlisle that April,

without some action to redeem opinion [at home], I fear treaties will prove fruitless, if not hugely dishonourable ... It is high time to vindicate the king’s honour and that of the nation, which will never be effected until you put ships to sea and act something abroad – which will also make you esteemed at home.183SP84/139, ff. 86, 92v.

Vane’s correspondence also reveals the great importance he attached to strengthening the crown’s finances as a pre-requisite of effective British intervention in European affairs. Ideally, he would probably have preferred parliamentary subsides to fund an aggressively Protestant foreign policy. But even when there was little or no prospect of a new Parliament, as in the summer of 1630, he was still prepared to urge Charles to ‘put your affairs at home in such order as that the world may take notice that by the next spring you will be capable of making war or treating with your sword in your hand’.184Smuts, ‘Force, love and authority’, 33, 34, 43; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane’. Vane, in fact, showed a keen interest in financial reform and improving the king’s revenues throughout his court and parliamentary career.185Stowe 326, f. 64; Univ. of London, Goldsmiths’ Lib. Ms 195/1.

Vane’s handling of his embassy to The Hague earned him another major diplomatic assignment in September 1631, when he was appointed ambassador to negotiate with the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus and his German allies for the reconquest and restitution of the Upper and Lower Palatinate and for the ‘liberty of Germany [from imperial rule]’.186SP81/37, f. 118; Rymer, Foedera, viii. pt. 3, pp. 203-4; Coventry Docquets, 89-90. Sir Philip Warwick would later claim that it was the king’s bedchamber man James Hamilton, 1st duke of Hamilton, who procured this office for Vane – ‘his great confidant’ – as part of his own crown-supported military expedition in support of the Swedes.187Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 107. Vane and Hamilton certainly worked closely together in their dealings with Gustavus and were politically very much in step by the late 1630s. But it appears that Vane’s embassy to Germany was the occasion rather than the result of their friendship.188Bodl. Clarendon 5, ff. 86-8; G. Burnet, The Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton (1677), 52; P. Donald, An Uncounselled King (Cambridge, 1990), 140; J. Scally, ‘The Career of James, 3rd Marquess and 1st Duke of Hamilton (1606-1649) to 1643’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1993), 153-4, 240. The Venetian ambassador, on the other hand, suspected (probably rightly) that Vane had been proposed by Weston and the Spanish faction with a brief to secure an accommodation between Gustavus and the emperor in which the Palatinate would be returned by peaceful methods – thereby avoiding the need to provide the Swedish king with expensive military support.189CSP Ven. 1629-32, pp. 526, 538, 550, 555, 565, 588; Reeve, Personal Rule, 276, 286. That said, Vane was apparently enthusiastic at the prospect of Hamilton and his ‘brave’ forces joining the fight against the Imperialists. Writing to the queen of Bohemia, Vane assured her that ‘by this your Majesty may plainly see that whatsoever becomes of the treaty with Spain, your Majesty’s brother [the king] in all occasions is ready to lay hold and embrace any thing, way or means for the advancing of your interests’.190SP81/37, f. 53.

In fact, Charles did authorise Vane to make a serious offer of financial support to Gustavus, although he would not break openly with Spain or call a Parliament. Vane, however, was in an invidious position – caught between the clashing agendas of the Spanish and war factions at court and between Charles’s hopes for a recovery of the Palatinate at minimal expense (political or financial) and Gustavus’s own plans for the Electorate and his doubts as to Charles’s commitment to making an English alliance worth obtaining. Not surprisingly, once Vane reached Gustavus in Germany in November 1631 it was not long before he antagonised the Swedish king and sharp words were exchanged. Worried that Gustavus would not hand back the Palatinate if he conquered it, Vane opined in his despatches home that ‘to have the king of Bohemia restored the peaceable way is much the best’, but that if Charles did want to go down the military route it was necessary to put forces of his own into the field alongside the Swedes: ‘those princes that make themselves not considerable by their arms in this conjuncture with the king of Sweden ... will not be able to effect much’. His fundamental advice to Charles was to avoid half measures – if the king sought to advance his ends through peace, ‘a good one is to be endeavoured, if otherwise gaillarde guerre [a spirited war], for half ways will neither settle your government at home nor keep friends abroad’. Back at court, meanwhile, Vane was traduced for being both ‘Spaniard and puritan’ in trying to steer a ‘middle course’ in his negotiations with Gustavus. Lord Treasurer Weston and his court dependents were particularly unimpressed with Vane’s proceedings. Doubtless informed that the Spanish faction was winning the battle for counsel at court – particularly after the death of the war-party leader Dudley Carleton†, Viscount Dorchester, in February 1632 – Vane seems to have temporised on the king’s offer of financial support, and with little incentive on the Swedish side to make an alliance happen the negotiations collapsed.191SP16/221/25, f. 63; SP81/37, ff. 118-124v, 187-8; SP81/38, f. 85; SP84/142, f. 38v; Bodl. Clarendon 5, ff. 85v-88; Longleat, Portland pprs. XI, f. 9; CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 266, 278, 322, 323, 342, 389; CSP Ven. 1629-32, pp. xl-xli, 573, 577; J. Fowler, Hist. of the Troubles of Suethland and Poland (1656), 217-19; Gardiner, Hist. England 1603-42, vii. 189, 205; Reeve, Personal Rule, 283-8; Sharpe, Personal Rule, 81-2; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane’. Vane’s follow-up embassy to Gustavus’s Danish allies was even less successful, for, doubting his competence, Christian IV of Denmark refused to give him audience.192S. Murdoch, ‘Scottish ambassadors and British diplomacy 1618-35’, in Scotland and the Thirty Years’ War ed. Murdoch, 41, 48.

In the autumn of 1632, Vane was summoned home, where he was assured by Weston’s right-hand man Lord Cottington (Sir Francis Cottington†) that he had given the king ‘great satisfaction ... Through your wise and dexterous carriage of that great business you have saved his Majesty’s money and his honour and yourself from any kind of blame’.193SP16/223/56, f. 125; Bodl. Clarendon 5, ff. 88v, 90v; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. ii. 173. Gustavus’s death in November 1632 convinced Vane (wrongly) that the Swedes were no longer a military force in Germany, and he, in turn, convinced Charles to look to the elector of Saxony and the Danes for recovery of the Palatinate. Vane therefore sent the king ‘searching in the wrong direction for the current leadership of the Protestant alliance [in Europe] and alienated him from the Swedish camp’.194Murdoch, ‘Scottish ambassadors’, 41-2. Nevertheless, he retained the trust and, it seems, the affection of his royal master, who in May 1633 granted him a pension of £500 a year for his ‘many and faithful services ... both in the time of our being prince of Wales and since our happy access to the crown’. Charles also granted a pension of £300 a year to Vane II but only commencing after his father’s death.195LS3/251, pp. 70-2.

The personal rule and the bishops’ wars

Vane served diligently during Charles’s personal rule as comptroller of the king’s household and as a member of the board of the green cloth, which meant that he played a central role in overseeing the provisioning of the court. He was also involved in setting up independent households for the prince of Wales (the future Charles II) and Princess Mary. Appointed to numerous royal commissions and ad hoc committees of the privy council, he was apparently active in a wide range of administrative roles, from reforming the Great Wardrobe to investigating the administration of the poor laws.196CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 250, 270; 1633-4, pp. 50-1, 99; 1635-6, p. 1; 1636-7, p. 154; Collins, Peerage, iv. 510-11, 512-13; P. Haskell, ‘Sir Francis Windebank and the Personal Rule of Charles I’ (Southampton Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1978), 89-90; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane’. Moreover, as a member of the admiralty commission that operated between the death of Buckingham in 1629 and the appointment of Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, as lord admiral in 1638, he was a major figure in the creation and management of the Ship-Money fleet. When Northumberland fell sick in the summer of 1638, it was reported that ‘the place of lord admiral is in a manner totally and solely managed by Mr Comptroller’.197CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 422, 440; 1633-4, pp. 394, 398; 1634-5, pp. 222, 592-3; 1635, pp. 144, 147-8, 156, 243, 255-6, 319, 422, 482; 1636-7, pp. 161, 242-3, 250; 1637, p. 87; 1637-8, pp. 15, 445, 523; HMC 3rd Rep. 74; Strafforde Lttrs. i. 208-9; A. Thrush, ‘The Navy under Charles I 1625-40’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1990), 63; M.D. Shepherd, ‘Charles I and the Distribution of Political Patronage’ (Liverpool Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1999), 313, 322-3. Vane was on close terms with Northumberland – a true Marcher lord, unlike the Nevill manqué, Vane – by the late 1630s (and would apparently remain so until at least 1649), and he used his influence with the lord admiral and the king to secure Vane II the lucrative office of joint treasurer of the navy in January 1639.198Mems. of the Great Civil War, ed. Cary, ii. 138-9; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 159, 208; Clarendon, Hist. i. 249; Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 141, 147; Lttrs. and Mems. of State ed. A. Collins (1746), ii. 656; Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, ii. 115.

Following the lord treasurer’s death in 1635, Vane gravitated towards a faction at court, centred upon the queen, that was committed to bringing England into the continental Franco-Protestant alliance against the Habsburgs. Other members of this group included Northumberland, his brother Henry Percy* and the earl of Holland.199M. Smuts, ‘The puritan followers of Henrietta Maria in the 1630s’, EHR xciii. 30, 43-4. None of these men were committed puritans in the sense of prioritising further reformation in religion, and this was evidently true of Vane also. Archbishop Laud himself, who apparently had little regard for Vane, acknowledged him conformable to the Church of England – and Vane’s taste in worship and clerical protégés would appear to bear out this assessment.200W. Laud, Works ed. W. Scott, J. Bliss (Hildesheim, N. York, 1977), vi. 572. He spent a considerable amount of money during the later 1630s in refurbishing and endowing the vicarage of Staindrop, in county Durham, where he installed as curate the future royalist Nathaniel Ward, who became his close friend.201CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 98; Walker Revised, 144; Surtees, Co. Dur. iv. 137; J. Freeman, ‘The Par. Ministry in the Dioc. of Durham’ (Durham Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1979), 165, 375-6. Vane was also associated with another clergyman who would be deemed ill-affected by the Long Parliament, Thomas Blechynden.202CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 260; Walker Revised, 211. The identity of Vane’s domestic chaplain in Kent, one ‘Mr Bowles’, is a mystery – the claim that it was Oliver Bowles, a puritan incumbent in Bedfordshire seems highly implausible.203CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 394; 1639-40, p. 526; B. Brook, The Lives of the Puritans (1818), iii. 466-7; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 113.

Yet while Vane remained entirely conformable to the established church during the personal rule, he identified strongly with the tradition of service to ‘the true Reformed interest’ in Europe and to the ideals of chivalry made popular by Sir Philip Sidney during the Elizabethan era. Like several leading English Calvinists, Vane sent his sons abroad to complete their education at Leiden or other Protestant intellectual centres – an experience that may have encouraged several of them to fight in the Dutch army against the Spanish.204Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; CSP Dom. 1635, p. 385; 1637, p. 216; 1637-8, pp. 456, 474.

Regardless of his alignment at court with the friends of the Protestant cause, Vane remained first and foremost the king’s loyal servant and was therefore trusted with, and accepted, a major role in the planning and implementation of the king’s wars against the Scottish Covenanters in 1638-40 – although he himself would have preferred a peaceful solution to the Scottish troubles.205CSP Dom. 1637-8, pp. 266, 611; 1638-9, pp. 152, 168, 183, 190, 324, 334, 340, 511, 593; 1639, p. 344; 1639-40, p. 188; Strafforde Lttrs. ii. 181, 186; Clarendon, Hist. i. 195-6; Lttrs. and Mems. of State ed. Collins, ii. 615; Donald, An Uncounselled King, 75, 88. The king himself declared in 1638 that he could trust no one fully in this matter but Hamilton, Arundel and Vane (Vane, in turn, was said to have enjoyed the trust of Hamilton and Arundel).206Burnet, Dukes of Hamilton, 122, 139; Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 130, 141; Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 62. It was very largely Charles, Hamilton and Vane who devised the plan of attack against the Covenanters in the first bishops’ war of 1639.207Burnet, Dukes of Hamilton, 121, 122; Donald, An Uncounselled King, 140; Scally, ‘Hamilton’, 240. By the summer of 1639, Vane was in constant attendance upon the king and handling much of his correspondence with the privy council, Hamilton and Lord Deputy Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford) in Ireland, and in so doing he was effectively usurping a role that more properly belonged to the secretary of state, Sir John Coke†.208CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 38, 59, 65, 85, 377, 383, 400; 1640, pp. 641-2, 645; F. Pogson, ‘Wentworth and Court Politics, 1628-40’ (Liverpool Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1995), 269; Shepherd, ‘Political Patronage’, 166-7. Even as he neared the inner circles of counsel at court, however, Vane continued to entertain doubts about the wisdom of an uncompromising, military solution to the Covenanter rebellion. He was particularly worried by the mounting evidence of financial weakness and political division that the wars exposed in the English state. Although he never failed in his duty to the king during the bishops’ wars, he clearly welcomed the negotiated truce that ended the first war in 1639, and thereafter (like Northumberland) he urged caution in the face of shortages in money, supplies and political goodwill.209CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 391, 400; Donald, An Uncounselled King, 113-14, 253; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 63, 89, 125; Smuts, ‘Force, love and authority’, 43; Oxford DNB, ‘Algernon Percy, 10th earl of Northumberland’; ‘Sir Henry Vane’. He seems to have less intimately involved in the planning stages of the second bishops’ war, in 1640, than he had been in the first.210HEHL, EL 7810; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 332.

Vane’s loyal service to Charles was rewarded with appointment early in 1640 to two of the most influential positions at court – that of treasurer of the king’s household and, in place of Coke, secretary of state.211C181/5, f. 128v; HMC 3rd Rep. 80. It was assumed at the time (and has generally been since) that Vane attained the secretaryship through the influence either of the queen – who apparently believed, wrongly, that his office as treasurer would go to Sir Thomas Jermyn*, the brother of her favourite Henry Jermyn* – or of Hamilton, or both. But a more likely explanation for his preferment in 1639-40 is that it represented a continuation of the king’s accustomed policy of promoting those who were already well known to him and had proved themselves in his service.212HEHL, EL 7818-20, 7823; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 460; 1640, p. xlviii; HMC 3rd Rep. 80; Clarendon, Hist. i. 165; Gardiner, Hist. England 1603-42, ix. 87; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane’; Shepherd, ‘Political Patronage’, 165-70, 343, 352-3.

Vane’s appointment as secretary of state had been bitterly opposed, although without success, by Coke’s friend Lord Deputy Wentworth. According to court gossip in early December 1639, Vane and Wentworth were ‘great opposers and little friends to one another’.213HEHL, EL 7818-19; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 207; Clarendon, Hist. i. 197. Wentworth would shortly turn this animosity between the two men into ‘fiery feud’ by having the subsidiary title of baron of Raby inserted in the patent of 12 January 1640 creating him earl of Strafford. Although this was intended as a deliberate swipe at Vane, who coveted this honour himself, Wentworth’s choice of this title was not arbitrary, for he derived his descent from the Nevills, earls of Westmorland, whose seat had once been Raby Castle. Vane may have had advance notice of Wentworth’s designs on the barony of Raby, hence the two men’s hostility towards each other in December.214CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 436; Clarendon, Hist. i. 197; Heylyn, Observations, 228-9; Sharpe, Personal Rule, 841-2; Pogson, ‘Wentworth and Court Politics’, 118-19. Yet it is likely that their quarrel was more serious than simply a clash of court egos. If nothing else, Vane’s close association with Hamilton and the queen’s circle would have earned him Wentworth’s distrust. Allegations would later emerge that Vane, Hamilton and Arundel had been conspiring with Wentworth’s enemies in Ireland to have him removed as lord deputy and to divide the spoils of his office between them. Assuming that there was substance to these claims and that Wentworth had known about them, it would explain why he went out of his way to affront Vane over the barony of Raby – which then and later was seen as ‘an act of the most unnecessary provocation’.215CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 436; The Life and Original Corresp. of Sir George Radcliffe ed. T.D. Whitaker (1810), 228-33; Clarendon, Hist. i. 197; M. Perceval-Maxwell, ‘Protestant faction, the impeachment of Strafford and the origins of the Irish civil war’, Canadian Jnl. of History, xvii. 237-9.

The Short Parliament

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Vane was among those earmarked for government support in constituencies where the crown’s interest was strong (as it was in many of the Cornish boroughs), but he chose instead to stand as a candidate for his home county of Kent.216SP16/450/15, f. 25. He sought, and received, the backing of his neighbour and fellow courtier Edward Sackville, 4th earl of Dorset, and of his (Vane’s) kinsman, the Kentish gentlemen Sir Roger Twysden*, who thought him ‘a man truly devoted to God and his country’s good and that had persuaded the king to this course [summoning a new Parliament?]’. In view of Vane’s close association with the policies of the personal rule, however, Twysden was at pains to make clear that he supported Vane’s candidacy ‘with [not] the least intention [Vane] should diminish in ought the religion now established by law nor the liberties of the subject’. In accordance with Vane’s hope that he and Norton Knatchbull* would be elected knights of the shire without a contest, Twysden succeeded in securing the withdrawal of two potential competitors for the county places, Sir George Sondes† and Sir Thomas Walsingham*. Sir Edward Dering*, however, would not stand down and began rallying opposition to Vane, whose support for Ship Money had certainly not made him overly popular with the Kent electorate. On learning that he would face concerted opposition, Vane, ‘in great indignation’, immediately withdrew his candidacy and, ‘in revenge’ against Dering, used ‘all the instruments and power’ at his disposal in support of Twysden. Presumably Vane considered fighting for a seat, and the prospect of losing to a competitor, beneath his honour as a minister of the crown.217Supra, ‘Kent’; ‘Sir Roger Twysden’; Add. 34163, ff. 108v-109; Everitt, Community of Kent, 71-3. Having beaten a retreat in Kent he sought a safe haven as a carpetbagger, and on 16 March 1640 he was returned for the Wiltshire borough of Wilton, taking the senior place while Sir Benjamin Rudyerd took the junior. He almost certainly owed his election to the patronage of his long-time friend and court ally Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke.218SP16/224/62, f. 146; V.A. Rowe, ‘The influence of the earls of Pembroke on parliamentary elections, 1625-41’, EHR l. 252. In turn, Vane and Northumberland used their influence to secure the return of Vane II for Hull.219Supra, ‘Kingston-upon-Hull’; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 568.

Vane played a central and, as it proved, highly controversial role in the proceedings of the Short Parliament. As the more articulate of the two secretaries of state he was the crown’s leading spokesmen in the Commons, and once again he faced the unenviable challenge of trying to reconcile the king’s wishes with a trenchantly Protestant agenda that often cut right across them. His status as the most senior royal officer in the House was recognised in his appointments. He served as a messenger to the Lords on two occasions and was named in first place to six of the nine committees to which he was appointed, including the committee of privileges (16 Apr. 1640), a committee for managing a conference with the Lords concerning the subjects’ and Parliament’s liberties and innovations in religion (24 Apr.), and committees to inform the king of the House’s progress (or lack of it) in addressing the related issues of grievances and supply (2 and 4 May).220CJ ii. 4a, 6b, 7b, 8b, 9a, 12a, 15a, 18a, 19a, 19b; LJ iv. 71a. He seems to have chaired at least two of these committees – of which the most important was that established on 18 April to investigate the unruly proceedings at the dissolution of the last Parliament, in March 1629. In the debate that had preceded the setting up of this committee he had taken issue with John Pym’s implication that the House possessed, or should enjoy, privileges independent of the king’s authority. On 20 April, Vane reported the committee’s account of proceedings on the last day of the previous Parliament, but he seems to have taken no part in the ensuing debate, which ended with the House posing a series of heavily weighted questions to the effect that the manner in which Parliament had been dissolved was a grievance and a breach of the House’s liberties. Vane was then appointed, possibly against his private wishes, to a committee for preparing a representation to the king to this effect.221CJ ii. 6b, 7a-b; Aston’s Diary, 14, 18-22; Procs. 1640, 162-3.

Vane’s contributions to debate in the Short Parliament very often involved an attempt to gloss over or play down the perceived abuses of the personal rule in order to effect the king’s main business in summoning the two Houses – the voting of supply to sustain his war against the Covenanters. Three days after Parliament first met, on 16 April 1640, he tried to advance a definitive solution to this problem by suggesting that the House set up a committee for grievances and so leave itself free to address the issue of supply, and thereby ‘he hoped the king and country would receive content’. Unfortunately, this clever proposal for sidestepping the question of whether the redress of grievances should come before or after supply was scuppered by Pym, who insisted that ‘for a committee of grievances, it was to be the whole House, for not any sub-committee must conclude the House’.222Procs. 1640, 143-4; Aston’s Diary, 5. Thereafter, Vane was drawn into a series of individual firefights as and when grievances threatened to divert the House from making progress on supply. His task became particularly difficult when, on 22 April, the House moved swiftly from consideration of a report by the lord keeper concerning the state of royal finances to the vexed question of innovations in religion, as raised by a petition from the imprisoned Calvinist clergyman Peter Smart and a royal commission empowering Convocation to make new canons. To inquire into the commission, Vane warned, was to invite unforeseeable consequences. He then questioned whether the House should investigate innovations in the church merely on the basis of one petition (Smart’s) against the Laudian authorities. He wished that the House would proceed ‘affirmatively, not negatively by opposition’ or upon mere ‘common fame’.223Aston’s Diary, 32, 34. Yet even as he tried to head off the church’s godly critics, he hinted that he himself had issues with some aspects of the Laudian agenda. Thus he reminded the House that it had been the long-standing practice in cathedrals and the chapel royal to place the communion table ‘altar-wise’ as favoured by the Laudians. Significantly, however, he added that ‘as it generally goes’ – that is, with regard to communion tables in parish churches – ‘I must say no’.224Aston’s Diary, 90.

As often as the crown’s opponents brought up the issue of grievances, Vane attempted to bring the Commons’ attention back to the matter of supply. On 23 April 1640, he reminded the House that

the work of the day was a supply, and though we conceived we had many grievances, yet the way for their redress was by the king’s relief. [He] pressed the unhappiness that must needs befall our kingdom upon a disjunction [between king and Parliament] now, when the Catholic princes were united. [He] urged there were precedents in Parliament which gave priority to a supply ... [even] when, he said, a breach was conceived of the subjects’ liberty, nevertheless they began with a supply.225Procs. 1640, 171, 173; Aston’s Diary, 39.

The next day (24 Apr.), he tried to lessen the force of criticism concerning Ship Money and to have a proposal for legislation to ensure the frequent calling of Parliaments laid aside. If the House voted supply, he implied, then it would gain the king’s love and many reforms might be possible.226Aston’s Diary, 56, 58. When the House returned to debating Ship Money on 30 April, Secretaries Vane and Sir Francis Windebanke combined to defer any final judgement on the levy until MPs had heard what king’s counsel had to say as to its legality.227Aston’s Diary, 103-4; Procs. 1640, 185; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 116.

With the Commons dragging its feet over voting subsidies, Charles sent Vane to the House on 2 May 1640 to remind MPs of the ‘urgent necessity of supply’ and that a delay in complying with his wishes would be as destructive as a denial.228CJ ii. 18b; Procs. 1640, 187-8, 206-7; Aston’s Diary, 120. Vane, for his part, re-iterated his belief that supply should precede all other business and that the House should ‘trust the king upon his gracious promise’ to redress its grievances: ‘If we grasped at all, we might take hold of nothing. Proceeding with moderation may gain our ends’.229Procs. 1640, 207. It is possible that there had been some ‘backstage negotiations’ by Vane and other royal ministers by way of preparation for the king’s message, for when it was debated in a committee of the whole House, Vane received support from several MPs – most notably Sir Francis Seymour, one of the most experienced and respected Members, who affirmed that ‘if he had satisfaction for Ship Money he should trust the king with the rest’ and ‘give freely’. Here was a basis for compromise and Vane seized upon it, expressing approval of Seymour’s motion and ‘hoping that this day should produce some good effect’.230Procs. 1640, 189; Aston’s Diary, 122; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 116-17. However, he repeated his wish that the House would ‘set apart our grievances’, and he made it clear that ‘nothing ever fell from him importing the clear taking away of Ship Money’ and that no such undertaking from the king would be likely ‘with[out] equivalent consideration’. The king desperately needed Ship Money, claimed Vane, and had spent £230,000 more on the navy than he had ever received from the levy. If Parliament failed to do the king’s bidding and there was a ‘rupture’, Charles would not abandon Ship Money.231Procs. 1640, 192, 207; Aston’s Diary, 126. The debate lasted from ten in the morning until six at night but failed to produce the ‘direct answer’ on supply that the king had requested. At its conclusion, the House ordered that ‘for the difficulty of the matter debated’ it should be deferred until Monday (4 May) to provide ‘an absolute answer to his Majesty’, and it appointed a three-man committee, headed by Vane, to convey this message to the king.232CJ ii. 19a; Procs. 1640, 193.

Vane was closely involved in the deliberations at court on 3 May 1640 that resulted in the king’s offer to Parliament to barter Ship Money (worth about £200,000 a year) for 12 subsidies – that is, about £650,000.233Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 29; Radcliffe Corresp. ed. Whitaker, 234. First thing Monday morning (4 May), Vane presented this deal to the Commons. In return for 12 subsidies the king would abolish Ship Money ‘in regard that he perceived that to be the main stop in our passage to his supply’ and would give his ‘regal word [to] relieve our grievances part now, part at Michaelmas next [Oct. 1640]’.234Procs. 1640, 193; Aston’s Diary, 128; Clarendon, Hist. i. 177-8. But however strong the interest of the king’s ministers at Westminster and however effectively or otherwise Vane and his managerial team exerted themselves on the crown’s behalf, it proved insufficient to create a working consensus among MPs or to overcome the opposition of those for whom Ship Money was merely one of a number of abuses that must be eradicated before supply was voted.235Clarendon, Hist. i. 179-80; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 119-20; Sharpe, Personal Rule, 870-1; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 15. As he watched the debate become increasingly confused and the demands made upon the king’s patience multiply, Vane tried to recall Members to their duty. On the ‘happy resolution of this day’, he told them, would depend ‘the happiness of this kingdom’. There was a window of opportunity to settle the issue of Ship Money and that alone. If more concessions were sought, particularly the abolition of military charges, then Parliament would ‘run the hazard of a breach’ and break ‘upon the straight of time’. ‘Plain dealing is the best way’, he told the House, and he would ‘plainly know if the legality [of Ship Money] were voted whether we would then give the 12 subsidies’. When it became clear that the answer of many Members was effectively ‘no’, he resorted to more threatening language. The king would not relinquish military charges, he assured the House, and employing a heavy-handed but ominous pun he warned MPs that ‘his Majesty might in case of danger throw down any house to build a castle’.236Aston’s Diary, 132, 135, 137; Procs. 1640, 196.

Writing five or so years after this debate on 4 May 1640, Hyde would claim that he himself had done his best to bring the House to a resolution that would sidestep the vexed question of Ship Money’s legality and, in so doing, provide the king with at least some measure of supply. His tactic had involved splitting the question of voting the king supply from that of how much should be voted – which, he claimed, had been well received, until misjudged and malicious interventions by Vane and the solicitor-general, Edward Herbert, had allowed John Hampden, Oliver St John and other critics of royal policy to kill the debate. According to Hyde, Vane had insisted that it had always been his custom ‘to deal plainly’ with the House and that he could assure MPs, ‘and had authority to tell them so, that if they should pass a vote for the giving the king a supply, if it were not in the proportion and manner proposed in his Majesty’s message it would not be accepted by him’. Vane’s words here about plain dealing are echoed in one of the diaries of the Short Parliament, but otherwise this speech – an important one in the circumstances – is not recorded. Either it was lost amid what was by all accounts a ‘tumultuous and confused’ debate or Hyde was letting his contempt for Vane cloud his memory.237Clarendon, Hist. i. 181-2; Sharpe, Personal Rule, 872. What is clear is that by the end of the debate both Vane and the solicitor-general were trying their hardest to have the issues of military charges and the legality of Ship Money laid aside and to focus the House’s attention on one question only – ‘whether or no the House would supply the king’.238Procs. 1640, 196. In this they failed, and at six in the evening the Members adjourned for the day after voting that the debate should be resumed the next morning and appointing Vane, Windebanke and Sir Thomas Jermyn (Vane’s replacement as comptroller of the king’s household) to inform the king of their resolution.239CJ ii. 19b. Charles had had enough, however, and so, it seems, had Vane – indeed, Hyde claimed (somewhat implausibly) that Vane and Herbert, and they alone, had persuaded the king to dissolve the Parliament. At a meeting of the privy council the next day (5 May) in which the king sought approbation for this decision, Vane, when asked, declared that ‘there was no hope that they [the Commons] would give the king a penny and therefore absolutely voted for a breach’. This being what the king wished to hear, the rest of the councillors, except Holland and Northumberland, voted likewise, whereupon Parliament was duly dissolved.240Clarendon, Hist. i. 182; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 29; Radcliffe Corresp. ed. Whitaker, 235; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 16-17.

Hyde was by no means the first to allege that Vane had deliberately misled the House as to the king’s minimum terms for relinquishing Ship Money, thereby dooming the Short Parliament and perhaps the entire Caroline order. The author of this allegation was the earl of Strafford, who at his trial in March 1641 was adamant that on 3 May 1640 he had secured the king’s consent to abolish Ship Money for 12 subsidies or, if that had proved too great for the Commons to stomach, eight subsidies, and thereupon Vane had been instructed by Charles to offer eight subsidies if necessary.241Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 29; Procs. LP iii. 39; Radcliffe Corresp. ed. Whitaker, 234. As Vane had then failed to lower the king’s offer to eight subsidies when necessity in the debate on 4 May had clearly demanded it, the ‘crime’ of breaking the Short Parliament was laid very largely at his door and was accounted by some as ‘little less than treason’.242HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 387. The problem here, of course, is that if Vane had received such instructions from Charles and had then flagrantly disobeyed them it is inconceivable that he would have retained the king’s trust thereafter – which quite clearly he did. Strafford himself conceded that Charles had been reluctant to offer less than 12 subsidies, and the obvious explanation is that after the earl had browbeaten the king in council into dropping his offer to eight subsidies if necessary, the king had afterwards privately instructed Vane to stick to 12 come what may. Indeed, it is entirely possible that Vane – more sensible than Strafford of how vital Ship Money was to the crown’s solvency and the maintenance of England’s pretensions as a Protestant power – had persuaded Charles that it should not be bartered away lightly.243Gardiner, Hist. England 1603-42, ix. 113, 115-6. Naturally, Vane would have been reluctant to disclose any such private conversations with the king, and therefore the blame for breaking the Short Parliament was imputed almost wholly to his public ‘treachery’ in the debate on 4 May. Worse still, his supposed disloyalty to the king ‘was thought by many understanding men’ to have been merely a ‘cunning piece of malice’ to crush Strafford on the anvil of Charles’s and the public’s displeasure.244Radcliffe Corresp. ed. Whitaker, 229; Clarendon, Hist. i. 182; Lilburne, Resolved Mans Resolution, 14; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 98-9; Heylyn, Observations, 229-30; CSP Dom. 1640, p. xvi.

Vane’s reluctance to abandon Ship Money was of a piece with his anxiety that continued war against the Scots risked bringing England to the brink of financial and political ruin. In a meeting of the council sub-committee on Scottish affairs on 5 May 1640, he clashed with Strafford over military strategy. Strafford urged an offensive war, Vane a defensive campaign – which would certainly have been cheaper and made reconciliation with the Scots easier.245Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 532, 546; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 125; Oxford DNB, ‘Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford’. Although it was Strafford’s counsel that prevailed, Vane served the king loyally as the second campaign against the Covenanters faltered in the face of lack of money and popular support and then suffered a fatal check at the battle of Newburn in August 1640. He was involved (though not as closely as Windebanke) in trying to uncover and prevent the designs of the Scots’ aristocratic English allies – a group that included Pym and St John – and he regarded the petition of the twelve ‘disaffected’ English peers to the king of 28 August calling for a new Parliament as ‘very high’. Even after the defeat at Newburn, Vane did not abandon hope that Englishmen would rally to the king’s cause, ‘that we may recover the honour of our ancestors, which I am sorry to live to see thus exposed to scorn and infamy’.246CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 15, 47, 57, 74, 80, 97, 144; Procs. LP i. 79, 81; HEHL, EL 7843; Lttrs. and Mems. of State ed. Collins, ii. 658, 659-60; Sharpe, Personal Rule, 894; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 23, 78, 79, 87. His loans of £2,500 and £840 to the king in August and September were probably intended as contributions to the royal war chest against the Scots.247SO3/12, ff. 117, 141; T56/5, p. 129.

Early career in the Long Parliament, 1640-1

Vane toyed with standing for Kent again in the autumn of 1640, but on finding the freeholders unreceptive to the idea he erred on the side of caution and secured his former seat at Wilton on 16 October.248Everitt, Community of Kent, 76. It was Vane who made the very first formal utterance on the floor of the Commons in the Long Parliament when he nominated William Lenthall as Speaker on 3 November.249CJ ii. 20a; Procs. LP i. 5, 7.

Vane’s activities during the first year or so of the Long Parliament’s proceedings were shaped to a great extent by the resumption of his role as the king’s senior spokesman in the Commons – a burden made all the heavier by Secretary Windebanke’s flight to the continent in December 1640. Between the opening of Parliament and his accompanying the king into Scotland in August 1641, he was appointed to approximately 30 committees, named in first place to 20 of these (including a committee set up on 30 December 1640 on a bill for annual Parliaments) and chaired at least two.250CJ ii. 23b, 40a, 48b, 54a, 57a, 60a, 66a, 86a, 91b, 92a, 97a, 107a, 109a, 113a, 143a, 143b, 152a, 164a, 207b, 212b. More revealingly, he was named to almost 40 conference-reporting or management teams – most of which were concerned with sorting out the crown’s relations with the Scots – and served as a messenger to the Lords on seven occasions.251CJ ii. 52b, 78b, 141b, 153a, 171b, 186a, 192b; LJ iv. 111a, 243a, 255a, 285b, 294b; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 82. In addition, he was an important figure in communicating the Commons’ wishes to the king and vice versa.252CJ ii. 23b, 26b, 28a, 28b, 29b, 40b, 43b, 50a, 50b, 52b, 70b, 75a, 86a, 108a, 110b, 112a, 129a, 131b, 142a, 199a, 201a; Procs. LP i. 65, 67, 70, 158, 310, 324; ii. 454; iv. 161, 163; v. 321; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 86.

Very few of Vane’s committee appointments during the period 1640-1 related to reforming the perceived abuses of the personal rule – which is hardly surprising given that he had figured prominently in Charles’s ‘new counsels’ and was considered ‘one of the most dangerous instruments of state before this Parliament began ... that ever this kingdom had since the reformation of religion’.253CJ ii. 47b, 57a, 60a; PJ iii. 357. On several occasions in 1640-1 he was criticised by various MPs for what they saw as his high-handed proceedings as a royal servant during the 1630s, and the parliamentary diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes thought he was very much beholden to the House ‘for our mercy in passing him by when we had questioned so many lesser offenders’.254Two Diaries of Long Parl. 16-17; PJ iii. 357; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 367. Not that Vane was particularly apologetic about his role during the personal rule or tried to distance himself from it. On 7 November, when Pym presented petitions from the wives of the puritan ‘martyrs’ Henry Burton and John Bastwick requesting their release from imprisonment, Vane followed Sir Thomas Jermyn in urging that nothing be done on this matter until king’s counsel had been consulted. Indeed, Vane went further and declared that the petitions ‘trenched much upon the state’, that the men’s imprisonment ‘was by course of justice’ and that Pym had spoken ‘not knowing the true information of the business’ – which could not be said of Vane himself, for he had been one of the royal councillors who had forwarded the trial and punishment of Burton, Bastwick and William Prynne* during the mid-1630s. On 12 March 1641, the Commons resolved that he should pay Burton compensation, although this vote was never turned into an order.255CJ ii. 102b; Procs. LP i. 31-2, 38-9; ii. 723; Docs. rel. to the Procs. against William Prynne ed. S.R. Gardiner (Camden Soc. n.s. xviii), 16, 23, 58, 61, 63, 68.; C.N. Reese, ‘Controlling Print? Burton, Bastwick and Prynne and the Politics of Memory’ (Penn. State Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2007), 83-4.

The only ‘evil counsellor’ whom Vane is known to have openly helped the Long Parliament bring to book was, predictably, the earl of Strafford. On 13 November 1640, two days after Strafford’s arrest and imprisonment, ‘Mr Treasurer, of himself [i.e. of his own volition]’, offered to move the king to provide three of the earl’s letters, or copies of them, for the committee that was preparing charges against the lord lieutenant.256CJ ii. 28a, 29b. That same day (13 Nov.), he delivered the House’s request to the king for a royal order to expedite the sending over of Strafford’s right-hand man in Ireland, Sir George Radcliffe.257CJ ii. 28b. In the weeks preceding Strafford’s trial in March 1641, Vane was named to a committee concerned with managing the trial proceedings, and it was observed on 20 March that though ‘fiercely’ against the earl, he supported the reading of a petition from him, ‘thereby to show his own moderation’.258CJ ii. 98a; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 25.

Rather than focus on tearing down what was in part his own political legacy from the personal rule, Vane devoted much of his energy during the early months of the Long Parliament to sorting out and improving public revenues. His interest in the kingdom’s finances had a particular political aim, however, one that the king undoubtedly encouraged him to pursue, and that was maintaining the royal armies in northern England and Ireland as viable fighting forces while monitoring and ideally restricting the flow of English money to the Scottish army occupying Northumberland and county Durham. In a debate on 13 November 1640 concerning the supply of the armies in the north, Vane moved that a loan be raised in the City on the security of a new parliamentary subsidy. However, he urged Parliament to appoint treasurers of its own ‘to see the money rightly disposed of’, for he was unwilling to trust the financial claims of the Scottish army. He also made the revealing remark that ‘a treaty is best accommodated when armies are equal in the field’ – in other words, the supply of the English army should not be neglected.259Procs. LP i. 132, 135, 138-9, 139. In the following weeks he made several motions to expedite the raising of money while at the same time supporting the king’s efforts to keep the English army up to strength – specifically, by resisting the Commons’ efforts to have it purged of Catholic officers. Such a course, Vane advised the House on 24 November, ‘would upon the sudden weaken the army’, and yet ‘the Scots go on to levy and makes [sic] out new commissioners to the contribution’.260Procs. LP i. 159, 228, 268, 277, 376; Northcote Note Bk. 82; CJ ii. 43b. On 12 December, he was added to the committee to consider the state of the English forces in the north, with particular reference to the payment of garrison troops, and he was named in first place to a committee set up on 11 January 1641 for paying and regulating the king’s army.261CJ ii. 50a, 66a.

Vane’s influence and expertise regarding the kingdom’s finances was acknowledged on 14 December 1640, when Pym moved that ‘a noble person near the chair [i.e. Vane] might be entreated to ... desire leave of him [the king] to look into the revenues of his crown and his expenses’.262CJ ii. 50b; Procs. LP i. 596. Thus charged by the House, Vane reported on 17 December that Charles ‘doth very graciously interpret the same ... and hath given order that all his officers and ministers ... shall assist the House therein’.263CJ ii. 52b. Yet despite the parlous state of royal finances, the king and Vane were reluctant to dismantle what remained of the crown’s military resources while the Scots still occupied English soil. On 7 January 1641, Vane and Jermyn took issue with a motion of the godly MP Sir Walter Erle that the king’s Irish army, which had been raised by Strafford, be disbanded. Vane ‘wished that till the Scottish army were dissolved and gone home that the said ... Irish army might still be held together under pay’.264Procs. LP ii. 136-7; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 188. Thereafter, he repeatedly expressed his opposition to a premature disbandment of the Irish army, and on one occasion he reminded the House of the unhealthily large Scottish presence in Ulster.265Procs. LP ii. 419-20; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 16. Only once the king’s troops as well as those of the Scots been paid would matters be ‘laid quiet and settled’ and could the House proceed with disbanding all the armies.266Two Diaries of Long Parl. 4, 24-5.

Vane was named in first place during February and March 1641 to several conference-reporting teams and a series of committees, chairing at least one of them, for securing the king’s assent to a subsidy bill (the proceeds of which went towards the supply of the armies in the north), raising loans in the City, investigating and mulcting the customs farmers (in which cause he was ‘a great actor’) and to prepare a bill for tonnage and poundage.267CJ ii. 78b, 86a, 91b, 92a, 107a, 109a, 112a, 113a; Procs. LP ii. 510; iii. 133, 136; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 29; St. 326, f. 92. This last committee was also charged with considering how to advance money for the navy and was ordered to meet in Vane’s chamber at Whitehall. Like Vane II, Vane spoke expertly and at length about the state and management of the navy and of the dire implications in under-funding it, for besides the threat from Barbary corsairs there was, he claimed, ‘never a prince in Christendom that has not these last 20 years increased in shipping’.268Supra, ‘Committee of Navy and Customs’; CJ ii. 107a, 110a, 110b, 116b; Procs. LP ii. 566, 650, 788, 795, 800; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 7, 21-2, 23-4, 78-9; Northcote Note Bk. 109, 114-15. But he was careful to stress ‘the king’s wants above the matter of the navy’ – and equally concerned that the needs of the English army were not neglected.269Procs. LP ii. 800; Northcote Note Bk. 114.

Vane’s determination to prioritise the upkeep of the king’s English and Irish armies before that of the Scottish forces in northern England was a potential flashpoint in his dealings with Parliament’s reformist leadership – a group known as the ‘junto’. On 22 January 1641, he and several other courtiers opposed providing any remuneration for the Scots’ ‘losses and necessities’ since invading England. Even a vote to provide ‘supportation’ in principle, argued Vane, would end up binding Parliament to pay the entire £514,000 the Scots were claiming. Pym, however, succeeded in securing just such a resolution.270Procs. LP ii. 249, 250; HEHL, Ms HM 55603, f. 37; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 186-7. On 6 March, Vane tried again, urging ‘very earnestly that not a penny of the £50,000 promised to be sent to the king’s army’ should be diverted to the Scottish army. Later that day, however, he bowed to pressure from the junto and the Scots themselves – who were threatening to march further south unless they were rapidly sent money – and conceded that they should at least have £10,000 of the £50,000 assigned for the king’s army.271Procs. LP ii. 650, 651. When, on 24 March, a petition was read in the House from the English army in the north complaining of lack of pay and intimating a desire to renew hostilities against the Scots, Vane was apparently the first to respond with assurances that money would be found. The army must not be allowed to get out of order, he declared, but equally the Scots must not move south of the River Tees.272Procs. LP iii. 112-14, 321.

Vane’s relations with the junto during the winter of 1640-1 were ambivalent. In insisting that the king’s armies in England and Ireland should not be sacrificed to meet the political or financial demands of the Scots, Vane – though doubtless following his royal master’s brief – seems to have been expressing his own sincerely held views, thereby putting him fundamentally at odds with the junto, which relied heavily on using the Scottish presence in England to bend Charles to its will. Nor is it plausible to suppose that Vane was ignorant of this stratagem. Hamilton, Pembroke, Northumberland and several other of his courtiers friends and patrons were probably privy to most of the junto’s deliberations, as, of course, was Vane II. Moreover, Vane evidently retained the trust of perhaps the leading junto-man, the earl of Bedford. He seems to have supported Bedford’s proposal in December 1640 for reforming the court of wards – or at any rate, he apparently warned the privy council secretary Edward Nicholas† not to cross it – and was seen at the time as one of the earl’s friends who ‘were in great expectation and general opinion to be then shortly preferred to sundry offices and places of near trust about his Majesty’, as part of the projected settlement of early 1641.273Stowe 326, f. 92; SP16/473/97, f. 208; SO3/12, f. 113; CSP Dom. 1640-1, 328; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 238, 253-4; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 590. There is no evidence, however, that the junto backed Vane for yet greater preferment at court. On the contrary, his ambition by January 1641 to replace Strafford as lord lieutenant of Ireland put him in direct competition with the junto’s preferred candidate for this office, Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester. That Vane had the support of the queen’s favourite, Henry Jermyn, before the latter was bought off by Leicester’s friends, is probably another indication that he remained closer to the court than to the junto.274HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 362, 366-7, 367-8, 369, 370, 387; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 153, 158, 200-1. Assuming, as seems likely, that he worked closely with Hamilton, Northumberland and several other of the junto’s allies during the early months of 1641 on the royal commission to negotiate a marriage treaty between Charles’s daughter Princess Mary and the prince of Orange’s heir Prince William, it was not because he was complicit with the junto’s designs but because he shared its commitment to moving England out of Spain’s orbit and back towards the Protestant interest on the continent.275Archives ou Corresp. Inédite de la Maison D’Orange-Nassau ed. G. van Prinsterer (Utrecht, 1857-61), ser. 2, iii. 306, 325-6, 338, 353, 358-60, 368-70, 373; Ceremonies of Charles I ed. Loomie, 298, 299; CSP Ven. 1640-2, pp. 116, 129; HMC Cowper, ii. 274; Juxon Jnl. 93; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 172, 189. Before the Dutch treaty negotiators left England, Vane told one of them that ‘after the prevailing confusion in England had been settled, Parliament wanted to conclude an alliance with the [Dutch] republic’.276Poot, Anglo-Dutch Relations, 170-1.

Where Vane did collaborate with the junto, at least for short-term political ends, was in frustrating the king’s attempt in January 1641 to pardon the Catholic priest John Goodman. Like most Parliament-men, Vane did not approve of royal clemency towards popish priests, and he publicly distanced himself from the king’s actions on this occasion. But it was not the religious dimension of Charles’s leniency that worried Vane and others so much as the implications for the fate of Strafford. The king’s use of his prerogative to reprieve Goodman was ‘taken by all to have been done of purpose for a preparative to save the life of the [lord] lieutenant’ – and to prevent that, Vane was prepared to defy Charles’s wishes regardless of the consequences.277CJ ii. 73a; Procs. LP ii. 261; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. i. 295; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 162, 165-6, 167. Yet if there was any lasting coolness between Vane and the king as a result of the Goodman affair it was not commented upon at the time. It was almost certainly as the king’s senior representative in the Commons, rather than as a sympathiser with the Covenanters or their junto allies, that Vane was named to a series of conference-reporting teams during the early months of 1641 on the treaty and relations between the two kingdoms (Vane had negotiated with the Covenanters on the king’s behalf at Berwick in June 1639 and again at York in September 1640).278CJ ii. 53a, 62a, 62b, 67a, 69a, 74b, 78b, 80b, 83a, 96a, 97a, 100a, 106b, 110b, 118b, 120b, 125b, 142a, 142b; Procs. LP ii. 416, 619, 684; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 83; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 376; CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 97, 128; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 63.

The gulf between Vane and the more zealously pro-Scots junto-men was particularly wide on the issue of further reformation in religion. When the root and branch petition was presented to the Commons on 11 December 1640, he professed to be scandalised not only that ‘Brownists’ had helped organise it but also ‘in particular’ at the petitioners’ ‘exception at the kneeling at communion’ – a practice demanded by Laudian clerics and which many of the godly, including Vane II, found deeply objectionable. Take care, Vane I warned the House, ‘that [our] own divisions bring not worse evils than papists’.279Procs. LP i. 568; Northcote Note Bk. 52; CSP Dom. 1635, p. 385. In the great root and branch debate of 7-8 February 1641, Vane acknowledged the need for some degree of religious reform, but he would not countenance the abolition of episcopacy, and he criticised the ‘art and skill’ used to drum up support for such a policy.280Procs. LP ii. 392; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 3. He also wanted a door left open to prelacy, joining the future royalist grandee Edward Hyde on 22 March in challenging the idea that clergymen should be removed from temporal office: ‘this matter of their being privy councillors was a right vested in the king to name such and elect them as he would have of his council, and that bishops might sometimes be as fit for that employment as other men’.281Procs. LP iii. 51. Vane’s comments here, as in December and February, were not necessarily inconsistent with the junto’s efforts to kick the whole controversial issue of root and branch into the long grass. But they manifested a vehemency against further reformation that even the episcopalian, Bedfordian wing of the junto might well have regarded as impolitic from the point of view of appeasing the Scots. In the February debate, for example, Pym largely maintained a judicious silence.

The fall of Strafford

Evidence of a souring in relations between Vane and the king was not detected by contemporaries until late February 1641 – and the cause, inevitably, was Vane’s feud with Strafford. As a result of Strafford’s rebuttal of the charges against him on 24 February before the Lords (and with the king present), it became clear to Charles that Vane’s testimony would be vital to the prosecution’s case. According to one Dutch observer, Vane was already in the queen’s bad books (probably for supporting the Dutch marriage, which Henrietta Maria thought beneath her family’s dignity), and Strafford’s performance on 24 February seems to have brought Vane into equal disfavour with the king.282Harl. 6424, ff. 34v-36v; Archives ou Corresp. Inédite de la Maison D’Orange-Nassau ed. van Prinsterer, ser. 2, iii. A week later, Sir John Coke* informed his father (the man whom Vane had replaced as secretary of state) that Vane was

quite out of power both with the queen and the king, who have chidden him bitterly the last week as one that have [sic] betrayed him [i.e. Strafford] and joins with a faction against him. Since that time he hath been but once for an hour at the House of Commons: his friends pretend that the [marriage] treaty with the Dutch ambassadors takes up all his time.283HMC Cowper, ii. 274.

Vane’s turn to testify at Strafford’s trial came on 5 April 1641 in relation to the 20th and 23rd charges against the lord lieutenant – that he had been the chief instigator of an offensive war against the Scots and that he had persuaded the king to dissolve the Short Parliament prematurely on the understanding that he (Strafford) had an army in Ireland that could be used to reduce England to obedience.284Procs. LP iii. 34, 38. Vane confirmed that in the meeting of the council sub-committee on Scottish affairs on 5 May 1640 he had propounded a defensive war whereas Strafford had urged an invasion of Scotland. But the evidence he gave relating to the 23rd charge was less clear-cut. He confirmed that at the 5 May meeting Strafford had said that the king had an army in Ireland that could be employed to reduce ‘this kingdom’, but Vane refused to be drawn on whether by ‘this kingdom’ Strafford had meant England rather than Scotland. A key word that Vane did not remember Strafford using in this context was ‘there’, with the obvious inference that the earl had meant ‘here’ – meaning England. Yet in his testimony to the parliamentary ‘preparatory committee’ for drawing up charges against Strafford, Vane had apparently said that the earl had used the word ‘here’. Was Vane, in his trial testimony, trying to maintain an air of impartiality in order to mitigate his offence in the eyes of the on-looking Charles, while subtley hinting at Strafford’s guilt?285Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 531-2, 544-6; Procs. LP iii. 369, 377, 390, 395, 397; HMC 4th Rep. 61. If Strafford had indeed meant England – which seems unlikely, though Pym had claimed it could easily be proved by half a dozen witnesses – then he had advocated the use of armed force to subvert the kingdom’s fundamental laws, which could be construed as treason. This piece of evidence was the most damning of any deployed against Strafford, but Vane was the only witness that the prosecution could produce to make it stick. Moreover, Vane’s previous testimony on this vital bit of evidential detail had been less than consistent. When he had been questioned on oath in December 1640 by the preparatory committee, he had initially denied that the earl had designed to use the Irish army in England and had then said that he could remember nothing concerning the matter (although Vane would be ‘cleared’ in July ‘by divers of the [preparatory] committee that he did never affirm he could say nothing of the matter of bringing over the Irish army and reducing this kingdom ... and that he only desired respite and time of consideration to be examined to that particular’). It was only in mid-January, after Pym had insisted that he should be re-examined, that Vane had testified to the committee that Strafford had talked of using the Irish army to reduce ‘this kingdom’.286HMC 4th Rep. 60-1; The Lord Digby His Last Speech (1641), 6-9 (E.198.1); Procs. LP iii. 369; v. 616, 621; Sharpe, Personal Rule, 944. And there was another problem. Although Strafford may well have brought the Irish army into the discussion on 5 May, the only person then present who remembered it later, or at least would admit to remembering it, was Vane – and to secure a conviction for treason (as the earl repeatedly emphasised) required, by law, two witnesses.287Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 565, 638; Procs. LP iii. 400, 522; Gardiner, Hist. England 1603-42, ix. 123-4.

After Strafford’s trial broke up in confusion on 10 April 1641, the prosecution made a belated attempt to provide at least some corroboration by producing Pym and Vane II brandishing a copy of Vane’s notes of the 5 May 1640 sub-committee meeting. The story, as Vane II told it to the Commons, was that the previous September he had been rummaging through his father’s papers and quite by accident had found these notes and had made a copy of them (or, in some versions, had taken the original) which he had showed to Pym, who had made a copy of his own. When he heard this story, Vane I promptly accused his son of betrayal and declared that the latter ‘shall be [a] greater stranger upon this occasion than ever’ – implying that he and his son were already not on the best of terms. Pressed by the House to confirm that these notes were a true copy of the original, Vane admitted that they were but refused to expand on that admission until he could examine the copy himself, and then he would ‘do what became an honest man’. Leaving aside the question marks surrounding how the notes entered the public domain, their tone and content have a strong ring of truth about them. They also added that vital word ‘here’ (i.e. in England) that Vane had hinted in his testimony on 5 April that Strafford had used or implied when he had told the king on 5 May 1640 that he had an army in Ireland to reduce ‘this kingdom’. Far more dubious is the story of how the notes came to light, which sounded more far-fetched the more the Commons scrutinised it. Whether Vane I was party to this charade is not clear, though he had much to gain from what Pym and the Bedfordian wing of the junto were apparently attempting by it – that is, to resurrect the trial and to trade Strafford’s life for concessions from the king. Vane must have known that Charles’s honour and conscience was so far engaged in Strafford’s cause that while the king might accept the earl’s imprisonment or banishment he would not forgive anyone complicit in his execution.288Procs. LP iii. 493-5, 497-8, 498-9, 500-1, 511-12, 513; Verney, Notes, 37; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 38-9, 65-6; Clarendon, Hist. i. 301-6; Gardiner, Hist. England 1603-42, ix. 120-1, 125, 320-1, 328-9; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 287; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 241-2, 245.

Vane was not the only privy councillor who was clearly eager to bring Strafford down.289Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 284. But the whole process hurt Vane in point of reputation and influence at court more grievously than it did almost anyone else. The lord lieutenant’s counter-accusation on 24 February 1641 that it was Vane who had scuttled the Short Parliament seems to have been gaining credence before the trial, while Vane’s pious ejaculations on 5 April about serving only the truth even as he lent himself, albeit tentatively, to the incrimination of his bitterest enemy did not do his public image any good at all. On 8 April, the courtier Sir John Temple* wrote to the earl of Leicester that

we all give [Vane up] for lost. A very ill opinion is generally conceived of him for his late testimony, there being many circumstances that makes it strangely to be interpreted by many, and certainly it hath much lessened him in the king’s and queen’s good opinion.290HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 387, 398; Archives ou Corresp. Inédite de la Maison D’Orange-Nassau ed. van Prinsterer, ser. 2, iii. 390; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 205-6.

The performance in the Commons between the two Vanes and Pym on 10 April caused him to sink even further in men’s (and, more importantly, the queen’s) estimation, if that were possible. Bedford’s son-in-law George Lord Digby* was not alone in regarding Vane’s evidence against Strafford as proof of nothing except a design by Pym and the junto ‘to accuse and bring men into danger’.291PRO31/3/72, p. 525; Digby His Last Speech; Sharpe, Personal Rule, 944; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 273. In his speech to Parliament on 1 May in which he pleaded for Strafford’s life, the king implicitly gave Vane the lie by declaring that he (the king) ‘had never any intention of bringing over the Irish army into England nor ever was advised by anybody so to do’.292Procs. LP iv. 164.

Fall from court, 1641

Although Strafford’s trial and subsequent execution damaged Vane’s position at court, it does not seem to have pushed him immediately into the arms of the parliamentary opposition. As with the Goodman affair, his collaboration with the junto in Strafford’s prosecution was apparently directed towards one particular goal – to bring down a hated court rival – not to effect the larger design of coercing the king into granting ministerial offices and constitutional reforms. Certainly Vane’s Commons appointments and contributions to debate during the spring and summer of 1641 do not suggest that he was closely aligned with the junto or had ceased to promote the king’s agenda at Westminster. Even as he collaborated with the junto in proceedings against Strafford he criticised one of its favourite tactics to garner support in the Commons – the production of anonymous letters warning of popish conspiracies or, as on 12 April, ‘concerning God’s judgements against the whore of Babylon’. This practice, said Vane, ‘was grown to great heights and would be fit to receive a timely stop, that these writings without names should be brought in this manner’.293Two Diaries of Long Parl. 38; Procs. LP iii. 509, 517.

Vane refused to join the junto in making political capital out of revelations concerning the 1641 army plots. One of his first contributions to debate on this issue was to second one of the army plotters, Henry Wilmot*, in claiming that the soldiers assembled in London under Sir John Suckling* – for the purpose of springing Strafford from the Tower – were merely a troop of horse that he was taking to serve the king of Portugal.294Procs. LP iv. 179; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 293. On 4 May, Vane headed a conference-reporting team concerning the safety of the kingdom and, specifically, to request that the Lords join with the Commons in taking the Protestation.295CJ ii. 134a, 134b; Procs. LP iv. 192, 193. But it is not entirely clear that he regarded the Protestation as the best way of responding to the seeming threat of an imminent dissolution and a royally-sponsored military coup. Rather than adopt an oath of association like the Protestation he seems to have followed Sir John Culpeper and Sir Robert Pye I in urging the less radical course of using the 1628 Petition of Right and Remonstrance against tonnage and poundage as touchstones of allegiance.296Procs. LP iv. 180, 181; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 41. In keeping with his efforts to stop the junto exploiting the plots for political gain, he tried on 5 May to have information concerning the conveyance of a large quantity of match – which many Members believed ‘must be for a marching army and that ... there was some intention to bring up the English army to this town’ – laid aside.297Procs. LP iv. 214. His involvement on 8 May in drawing up heads for, and reporting from, a conference with the Lords concerning the army plot seems to have related mainly to the disbandment of the Irish army, which the king was now pressing due to lack of money.298CJ ii. 139b, 141a; Procs. LP iv. 271, 278, 284; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 298. Vane also played his part in Parliament’s attempts to address another major concern of the king – the threat to the queen mother and, by implication, the queen herself from anti-popish mobs in the capital.299CJ ii. 142b, 143a, 143b, 147b; Procs. LP iv. 320, 321. Amid the high drama of the House’s proceedings during May, Vane found time to defend the crown’s right of purveyance (the purchase of provisions for the court at less than market price), which, he insisted, had been a royal prerogative for 400 years and that the House should not meddle with until king’s counsel had been heard – a familiar device to delay or thwart reform.300Procs. LP iv. 628, 630.

Vane would have nothing to do with the most contentious of all Parliament’s projected reforms, the abolition of episcopacy. On 11 June 1641, he apparently took issue with the preamble to the root and branch bill that Vane II had helped to draft, arguing that ‘he that consents to the preamble agrees in effect to the body of the bill’.301Procs. LP v. 95. His instinct was to smooth away the rough edges in Parliament’s dealings with the king – as on 24 June, when he urged moderation in responding to the discovery of a ‘scandalous’ letter from the queen’s confessor, Father Robert Philips.302Two Diaries of Long Parl. 50-1; Procs. LP v. 321, 322-3. He was equally keen to exploit opportunities for closer cooperation between the king and Parliament, particularly in common service to the Protestant interest abroad. On 7 July, therefore, citing favourable circumstances in Germany for a new initiative to recover the Palatinate, he desired that the House ‘might proceed with the matter of the prince elector’s cause’ and the king’s ‘manifesto’ of 5 July, declaring anew his readiness to seek restitution for his sister’s family, if necessary by force.303Procs. LP v. 501-3, 531, 538; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 49. Vane’s involvement in the passage of Parliament’s Ten Propositions to the king that summer was apparently confined to reporting from a conference with the Lords concerning the king’s response to the third proposition – which was that Charles knew of no evil counsellors at court and thought it impertinent of Parliament to claim otherwise.304CJ ii. 208a; Procs. LP v. 601-2, 605-6.

With the failure of the army plot the king had no further use of the troops he had raised to fight the Scots, and by agreeing now to their disbandment he could also push to have the army of the junto’s Scottish allies similarly dismantled.305Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 303; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 313. Vane undoubtedly welcomed this development, although he remained suspicious of the Scots’ intentions even as work commenced on disbanding their forces, commenting darkly on 1 June 1641 that it was of ‘extreme disadvantage to let them [the Scots] get inch by inch upon us and bind up ourselves and leave them loose’.306HEHL, Ms HM 55603, pt. 2, f. 39. Finding the huge sums needed to pay off the armies in the north took up most of his time that spring and summer, and there can be little doubt that he was acting here primarily in accordance with the king’s wishes. Between early April and mid-July, he was appointed to numerous conference teams and committees – several of which he chaired – and made many reports to the House (frequently in considerable detail) about the state of the English and Scottish armies and proposals for raising the money needed to maintain and disband them. He suggested a variety of financial devices to raise the massive £1,000,000 or so required, including loans from the customers, London merchants and Parliament-men, and – a particular favourite of his – the collection and melting down of the kingdom’s plate.307CJ ii. 143a, 152a, 153a, 158b, 160a, 168a, 171b, 172b, 187a, 223b, 232a; LJ iv. 255a; Procs. LP iii. 417; iv. 165, 214, 216, 301, 320, 322, 324, 438-9, 443-4, 445, 505, 506, 513-14, 549-50, 551, 554, 583-4, 592, 624-5, 660, 691, 693-6; v. 79; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 44, 45-6, 47; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 17; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 323. On 2 June, he rebuked the City for its unwillingness to lend Parliament £120,000, declaring that in such a crisis he would have thought the lord mayor and his brethren would have surrendered their very chains of office to be melted down or pawned as their counterparts in Edinburgh had done.308Procs. LP iv. 691, 693, 696. His proposals concerning the requisition of plate quickly resulted in a bill to that effect, which included powers to imprison without bail those who refused to comply – prompting Denzil Holles to complain that it was ‘a slavery to be enjoined to bring in plate; as well might be enjoined [to] bring in wives and children’.309Procs. LP v. 84. Although Vane was the chief proponent of the scheme to coin plate, there is no firm evidence for the contention that he was also the moving spirit behind the idea of a graduated poll tax that was introduced to the House in mid-June by the ‘committee for advancing monies’ (set up on 11 May) chaired by Vane and Sir John Hotham. Vane clearly supported this proposal, but he was not named to the committee set up on 18 June and chaired by Edward Hyde for preparing a bill to introduce the tax.310CJ ii. 178b-179a; Procs. LP v. 217, 220-1, 224-5, 603, 634; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 49; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 336.

Political necessity required that much of the money destined for the Scottish army had to be channelled through the junto peer Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, thereby giving the junto considerably more financial power than the king himself enjoyed. Vane acknowledged the earl’s role as a major receiver of public revenues. However, he almost certainly approved of, and may even have proposed, a Commons order on 10 June 1641 that the money paid to Warwick be kept under lock and key ‘and none of it issued forth without special order from this House’.311CJ ii. 172b; Procs. LP v. 82; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 324-5. Vane was equally careful of those revenues of which the king was still the nominal beneficiary. He doubtless agreed with Sir John Culpeper on 1 June that a ‘considerable revenue’ should be settled upon the king out of the customs. But conscious as he was of the state of international relations, he warned that ‘if too great taxes or customs were laid upon foreign commodities, other princes would imitate us, and he wished a moderation might be held in all, and that in making the book of [customs] rates we should especially rely upon the skill of merchants’.312Procs. LP iv. 676; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 49, 58-9. On 10 June, he complained that there were ‘great difficulties’ in securing agreement between the crown and Parliament’s commissioners for tonnage and poundage, ‘by which means the bill [for tonnage and poundage] was retarded and the king lost daily in his customs’.313Procs. LP v. 78.

Vane was predictably busy both as a courtier and Parliament-man with preparations during July and August 1641 for the king’s journey into Scotland.314CJ ii. 192a, 192b, 207b, 227a; LJ iv. 294b; Procs. LP v. 398, 408-9, 604; vi. 122; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 74. On 4 August, he informed the Commons that the king had commanded his attendance during the royal visit to Scotland, and Vane therefore asked the House’s permission to grant him leave, which it did.315CJ ii. 236b; Procs. LP vi. 201. Given his involvement in the bishops’ wars, the idea of an extended sojourn north of the border cannot have been a particularly welcome prospect for him, and nor would he have derived much satisfaction from the fact that the king had requested his presence, for Vane was about the only senior minister whom Charles had left at his disposal. And with it becoming increasingly apparent that the king was looking around for at least one new secretary of state by July, Vane may well have feared that his days, too, were numbered.316Add. 78268, f. 7; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 406; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 342, 663. Moreover, by early August, John Digby, 1st earl of Bristol had secured the king’s promise that upon returning from Scotland he would bestow Vane’s office as treasurer of the household upon Thomas, 2nd Baron Savile (Sir Thomas Savile†).317CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 81. After Strafford’s execution, Charles was still willing to make use of Vane’s services as secretary of state and at Westminster, but he apparently regarded him as politically expendable.

The king stayed at Raby Castle on his way northwards in 1641, as he had done in 1633 and 1639, but that may have been to gratify his nephew the elector palatine, who was accompanying him into Scotland (and indeed, there was a ‘strange report’ at Westminster that Charles had by-passed Raby and gone straight to Newcastle).318CSP Dom. 1639, p. 59; 1641-3, pp. 75, 101; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. ii. 178; Surr. Hist. Centre, G52/2/19/2. At almost the same time that Vane was entertaining the elector at Raby, his mother (and Vane’s long-time correspondent) took grave offence at Vane’s refusal, on diplomatic grounds, to use her title of queen of Bohemia in a parliamentary declaration in support of her cause, and she was soon describing ‘Vanety’ as a friend neither to her family nor to the recovery of the Palatinate.319CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 91, 121, 127; Corresp. of the Queen of Bohemia ed. Akkerman, ii. 984, 991, 998, 1002. Writing from Edinburgh on 22 August, Vane informed Nicholas of the Scottish Parliament’s resolve to join with Westminster in support of the king’s July ‘manifesto’ and of Charles’s willingness

to take the prayers and preaching according to the form of the Scottish church, so that I assure myself by next spring he will be found in such a posture with his subjects that he will be useful to his friends abroad, to the comfort of all the Reformed [Calvinist] churches.320CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 101; Nicholas Pprs. i. 23-5.

Nicholas was less trusting of the times – and of Vane himself. The earl of Bristol and several other courtiers warned Nicholas that he ran ‘a great hazard’ by sending his despatches to the king through Vane – and Nicholas, in turn, repeatedly warned Charles that his counsellors in Scotland (and he clearly meant Vane in particular) were sending detailed intelligence to the junto.321Surr. Hist. Centre, G52/2/19/8-8a; Evelyn Diary ed. Wheatley, iv. 109; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 401. Late in September 1641, when it seemed that Charles might be on the point of returning to England, Nicholas advised him that ‘if your Majesty leave behind you some counsellors that you carried hence, it is thought your counsels here will not prosper the worse nor be the less secret; only it may be your Majesty may thereby deprive some mentioned in the paper enclosed [concerning junto plotting] of their wonted intelligence’.322Evelyn Diary ed. Wheatley, iv. 94. Nicholas was probably being sarcastic when he asked Vane to excuse him for not sending news of proceedings at Westminster, ‘for I know you have the same from the best Parliament-men at the first bound’.323CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 171.

Vane was included on a royalist list of the king’s leading opponents at Westminster by the autumn of 1641, along with Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, the earl of Warwick , Pym, Hampden, Vane II, Holles, St John and other members or allies of the junto.324HMC Salisbury, xxiv. 277. That Vane was at least collaborating with the junto can be inferred from a letter from the parliamentary commissioners in Edinburgh (all closely associated with the junto) to an unnamed treasury commissioner in mid-September, expressing a desire ‘to answer you in the same kind that you were pleased to favour us, by giving you some advertisement of what passeth here’. The letter is addressed to a commoner, and there were only two on the treasury commission – Sir John Bankes, who was privy to little of interest to the junto, and Vane. And while it would make no sense for the parliamentary commissioners to write to Vane if he, too, were in Edinburgh, in fact he was enjoying a ten-day break at Raby Castle in mid-September.325Beinecke Lib. OSB MSS 61, Howard of Escrick pprs., Box 1, no. 16; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 237-8.

Vane’s appetite to serve the king seems to have waned during the early autumn of 1641. Thomas Webb* informed Nicholas in mid-September that Vane ‘seems not to be well satisfied here [at court]. He is past fear of losing his treasurers place, for he sayeth he is sure of [losing] it, but if he should quit the other employment [as secretary of state], the king would not know where to have such another servant’.326Nicholas Prps. i. 46. Vane did not return to Edinburgh until about 11 October – having stayed at Raby much longer than his scheduled ten days – causing Nicholas to complain (perversely, given his now ingrained belief that Vane was leaking royal intelligence) of his being ‘so long absent in these active times, which some say is the cause that all his Majesty’s affairs are in such disorder’.327Surr. Hist. Centre, G85/5/2/14-15, 18, 21; G52/2/19/24-5; Nicholas Prps. i. 55. A few days later, Nicholas complained bitterly to the king, the queen, Lord Cottington and even to Vane himself about the latter’s failure to provide a loyalist counter-blast to the junto’s account of the Incident – Charles’s botched attempt to have Hamilton and his allies assassinated.328Surr. Hist. Centre, G85/5/2/17, 19-20; G52/2/19/26, 29-30; Evelyn Diary ed. Wheatley, iv. 107, 108, 110, 112. Vane defended himself by insisting that it was at the king’s request that he wrote nothing concerning the Incident. He also complained at what he saw as Nicholas’s efforts to steer the king’s business away from his hands.329Surr. Hist. Centre, G85/5/2/22-3; Nicholas Prps. i. 57, 58, 59; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 149-50, 160.

Vane returned to England in mid-November 1641 to reap the bitter fruits of his long years of royal service.330Nicholas Prps. i. 60. The king, on his way southwards, removed him as treasurer of the household (giving his place to Lord Savile), and on 3 December, soon after returning to London, he removed Vane as secretary as well (replacing him early in 1642 with Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland*). Vane reportedly tried to obtain audience with the king to put his case, but Charles refused to see him, ‘permitting him only to write his mind if he had ought to say’.331Add. 78220, f. 10; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 178, 189, 192. Contemporaries believed that Vane’s chief nemesis at court had been the queen.332CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 214; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 447. Vane II was removed from his office as navy treasurer not long after his father’s dismissal.333Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’. Vane I had been living on borrowed time as a courtier since Strafford’s execution, and he evidently knew it. But his secret correspondence with the junto had not been driven purely by pique at the prospect of losing office. He must have been dismayed at the marginalisation of his principal friends and patrons at court – Hamilton, Northumberland and Pembroke – in the months following Strafford’s execution and at the king’s increasing reliance on two of his main enemies, the earl of Bristol and his son George Lord Digby. In a letter to Nicholas late in October, having just received news of the outbreak of the Irish rebellion, Vane vented his frustration at the king’s policies:

Three kingdoms in this condition, no money and little affection, would be well thought of, and the Catholic Romish princes abroad all drawing to a peace. If time be not suddenly redeemed, divisions amongst ourselves cease and a face of unity both in church and kingdom – I will say no more. But we cannot be happy if we change not our counsels.

In edging towards the junto over the summer and autumn of 1641 and falling out of royal favour, Vane was following a very similar political trajectory to that of Northumberland, Pembroke and the other ‘good lords’ on the privy council.334SP16/485/36, f. 74; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 150, 189, 192, 194; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 447, 449.

Joining the junto, 1642

Vane had resumed his seat at Westminster by 11 December 1641, but now, of course, he was no longer styled ‘Mr Treasurer’ or ‘Mr Secretary’ by the clerk of the Commons and the parliamentary diarists but either as ‘Sir Henry Vane senior’ or simply ‘Sir Henry Vane’.335CJ ii. 338b. Similarly, Vane II was not always identified as ‘junior’, making it impossible at times to work out which particular Sir Henry Vane is being referred to in the Journals and diaries. Where no label is attached to the name there can be no presumption that it is Vane I who was meant – although there was a tendency among the clerks and the generality of MPs to recognise Vane’s status as one of the House’s elder statesmen by naming him in first place to conference-reporting and management teams and to committees. But there are plenty of instances of Vane I being named among the body of appointees or of committees where Vane II was named in first place.

The task of disentangling Vane’s parliamentary career post-1641 from that of his son is made all the harder by the fact that both men were exceptionally active at Westminster throughout the 1640s and early 1650s. Contrary to the assumption in most secondary accounts of the period, Vane’s influence did not wane after 1641 – at least, not at Westminster – and to claim that he was not ‘concerned in any measures against the king but continued in London, without acting in the rebellion’ is completely mistaken.336Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Henry Vane’; Collins, Peerage, v. 516. Between mid-December 1641 and the outbreak of the civil war the following August, he was appointed to a minimum of 20 committees and a maximum of about 70 – with the true number probably lying nearer the lower figure than the higher – and on at least 13 occasions (and perhaps as many as 19) he was named in first place. Two of these committees he is known to have chaired.337CJ ii. 340a, 348b, 357b, 358b, 372a, 373a, 375a, 378b, 384a, 422b, 424b, 429b, 431a, 471a, 484a, 491b, 511a, 531a, 535b, 562a, 574a; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 312. In addition, he was included on somewhere between 5 and 18 conference-management teams.338CJ ii. 353a, 362b, 450b, 503b, 530b. This was hardly the career profile of an MP uncontaminated by parliamentary defiance of the king.

Dismissed from court office, Vane aligned openly at Westminster with the junto. His emergence as a friend of the parliamentary leadership was effectively announced on 13 December 1641, when Pym moved successfully for his addition to a ‘select’, standing committee of both Houses for Irish affairs.339CJ ii. 340b; D’Ewes (C), 277; Clarendon, Hist. i. 430. Thereafter, he was named to several committees and conference-reporting teams on various aspects of the House’s orders relating to Ireland, and in debate he showed that his time as secretary of state had given him at least a working knowledge of that kingdom’s complex political landscape. Most of his attention on this aspect of the House’s business in late 1641 concerned raising money for suppressing the Irish rebellion and proposals for allowing the Covenanters to send 10,000 troops to Ulster – a measure he probably did not welcome but regarded as necessary given the plight of Ireland’s beleaguered Protestants.340CJ ii. 348a, 353a, 357a, 361a, 503b, 508a, 638a; D’Ewes (C), 332, 352; PJ i. 336, 383, 456; ii. 115, 119, 136; iii. 126. On 16 December, he was added to the committee for presenting the Grand Remonstrance to the king – which can hardly have been a pleasant assignment for a former royal confidant.341CJ ii. 346b. Nevertheless, he seems to have favoured the Remonstrance itself – or at any rate, he opposed Hyde, Culpeper and other members of the nascent royalist interest in the Commons when they argued on 20 December that MPs should be allowed to enter a ‘protestation’ against votes of the House from which they dissented – an issue that had first surfaced during the acrimonious debates surrounding the Remonstrance in November.342D’Ewes (C), 323; Verney, Notes, 136; Add. 64807, f. 14v. Vane’s involvement in drawing up a petition to the king a week later (27 Dec.), in which Parliament defended leading junto-men from allegations of disloyalty and demanded the ‘removal of ill counsellors and false informers’, probably deepened his estrangement from the court and its adherents.343CJ ii. 358a, 358b; LJ iv. 493. Even more provocative, perhaps, was his apparent support for removing the king’s most consistently loyal supporters at Westminster, the bishops, from the Lords.344CJ ii. 362b. Yet despite these early showings in the junto’s corner at Westminster, it was reported late in December that whereas Vane II was ‘much esteemed’ in the Commons, his father had ‘lost the good opinion of both sides’.345CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 211.

Vane was doubtless appalled by the king’s attempted arrest of the Five Members early in January 1642 – not least because it was widely attributed to the counsel of one of the men who had supplanted him in the king’s confidence, George Lord Digby. On 12 January, Vane was named in first place to, and subsequently made several reports from, a committee charged with investigating a design by the earl of Bristol and Lord Digby to assemble troops in and around London ‘in a warlike manner’.346CJ ii. 372a, 373a; PJ i. 43, 44. Five days later (17 Jan.), he headed the Commons contingent of a committee of both Houses to draw up a petition to the king, protesting at ‘sundry and great breaches of the privileges of Parliament’ and requesting that Charles furnish evidence to support his charges against the Five Members.347CJ ii. 384a; LJ iv. 528.

Vane’s appointments during the first half of 1642 suggest that he was a leading combatant in several of the ‘paper skirmishes’ between the two Houses and the king, whether it be opening royalist correspondence in search of juicy propaganda material or justifying the Militia Ordinance and Parliament’s removal of the magazine from Hull.348CJ ii. 424b, 431a, 450b, 452a, 478a, 484a, 530b, 531a, 562a, 573a, 635b; PJ ii. p. xx. More revealing still, he was named with Hampden, Vane II and four other leading parliamentarian MPs on 6 April to prepare a declaration for preserving a good correspondency between the two kingdoms – or in other words, to firm up Parliament’s relations with the Covenanters in case they should be needed in the event of civil war.349CJ ii. 513b. Having earned the trust of the parliamentary leadership by the spring of 1642, he was nominated by both Houses to the office of lord lieutenant of county Durham under the terms of the Militia Ordinance.350CJ ii. 424b; LJ iv. 577b. Now his adopted county’s most senior parliamentary figure, he presented a letter to the House on 7 March from a group of justices of the peace at Durham, asking for instructions on tendering the Protestation and requesting legislation empowering the county to return MPs to Westminster as others did.351PJ ii. 1. On 17 March, the Commons ordered Vane to discover the names of those under his new jurisdiction who had refused to take the Protestation, and on 7 April he carried up to the Lords a bill for enfranchising the county (though nothing would come of this or similar initiatives until the 1650s).352CJ ii. 482a, 515a; PJ ii. 136. A false alarm in mid-April that Lord Digby had procured a fleet and army from Denmark for the king, brought Vane to his feet in the Commons on behalf of his supposedly vulnerable northern charges. There was a necessity, he argued, ‘to have the northern coast well guarded with shipping and especially to look to the town of Newcastle’.353CJ ii. 535b; PJ ii. 195.

Few MPs could speak more knowledgeably about ‘shipping’ and international affairs than Vane, and arguably his most important appointments during the early months of 1642 were to committees that sought to exploit his expertise in naval and mercantile matters. He was named in first place on 14 January to a committee for putting a fleet to sea that summer and to contract with those merchants willing to provide the necessary ships; chaired by Giles Grene, this body may well have been set up to vie for control of naval policy with an earlier Commons ‘navy committee’ headed by the royalist MP Sir John Culpeper.354Supra, ‘Committee of Navy and Customs’; CJ ii. 378b. He was also named in first place to two committees in mid-February for promoting trade with Spain and the Levant – the second of these bodies was further charged with considering ‘how the trade of clothing and the vent of wool [by far England’s largest export products] may be set free and advanced’.355CJ ii. 422b, 429b. Vane chaired this committee, which was variously described as the committee ‘for the cloths of the kingdom’ or simply ‘the committee for trade’. The Commons referred a wide variety of merchants’ petitions to Vane’s committee and handed it the sensitive task of resolving disputes with the Dutch relating to the Amboyna massacre of 1623 and the East India trade (both of which had come under Vane’s portfolio as a royal minister). Vane made several ‘long and ... elaborate’ reports from the committee on measures for improving the cloth trade and addressing problems arising from the imposition of higher customs duties at home and abroad.356CJ ii. 451b, 462a, 471a, 491b, 528b, 538b, 583a; PJ i. 449, 456; ii. 8, 173-4, 207, 277; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 312; SP105/109, f. 190; SP105/150, ff. 21v-22, 29v; Cal. Ct. Mins. E. I. Co. 1640-3, xvi-xv, xxii, 50, 136-7, 141-2, 154, 169, 177, 183, 232, 233, 239, 241, 242, 249, 298, 358, 365.

Vane had absented himself from the Commons and was probably already in Kent when he was appointed to a committee on 22 July 1642 for preserving ‘the said county not only in peace amongst themselves but in a right understanding of the proceedings of Parliament’.357CJ ii. 686b; PJ iii. 357. In contrast to Vane II, however, he played no recorded part in trying to pressure the county’s gentry into repudiating the commission of array and their ‘late dangerous petition’ against Parliament’s defiance of the king.358Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Everitt, Community of Kent, 104-9; T.P.S. Woods, Prelude to Civil War 1642 (Salisbury, 1980), 100-8. In mid-September, he returned to the House, whereupon he was blasted by D’Ewes – on paper, at least – for his

late Machiavellian carriage ... for he had absented himself from amongst us for about the space of three months last past because he did not know whether the king’s party or ours would prove strongest, and now as soon as he heard that the king’s forces failed him, he returned to us again.359PJ iii. 357.

If Vane had indeed been making these kind of calculations over the summer and autumn of 1642 he was far from being alone.

But it was not Vane’s return to Westminster in the autumn of 1642 that signalled his commitment to the parliamentary cause: it was his addition on 13 September to Parliament’s main executive committee for the conduct of the war, the Committee of Safety* (CS) – to which Vane II had been added five days earlier.360CJ ii. 764a. To suggest that Vane’s desertion of the king can be ascribed merely to lingering enmity for Strafford or to the influence of Vane II – with whom he seems to have enjoyed far from cordial relations – is scarcely credible.361W. Dumble, ‘The Durham Lilburnes and the English revolution’, in The Last Principality ed. Marcombe, 231. Resentment at his removal from office in November-December 1641 may have played a part. But his fall from grace at court was probably as much a symptom as a cause of why he broke with Charles I. Like Northumberland, Pembroke and other former royal counsellors, it seems that Vane had progressively lost confidence in the king’s ability to defend the Protestant interest from the designs of ‘Romish princes’ and their supposed collaborators. The favour that Charles had shown to the Digbys since the summer of 1641, and rumours of royal complicity in the Irish rebellion, probably helped confirm Vane’s worst suspicions. Following the discovery early in 1644 of the royalist Brooke plot to divide the City from Parliament, Vane would vent his anger and sense of betrayal at what he perceived as yet more evidence of the pernicious influence of closet Catholics among the king’s confidants. Parliament’s eyes had now been opened, he declared

for that design which hath been working these 30 or 40 years ... There is not a prescribed man which is not a privy man about the king, and what can we hope for ...[if] those from the gunpowder treason [onwards] have been the plotters and actors of these design[s]? ... All the king’s protestations are to maintain the Protestant religion, [yet] we see that the papists are they that declare such in the king’s name.362Add. 18779, f. 44.

War and peace, 1642-3

Vane was in no mood to compromise after his return to Westminster in the autumn of 1642. In a debate on 15 September concerning recent peace overtures from the king, he sided with the ‘fiery spirits’ in arguing that Parliament should ‘prosecute the war unless he [Charles] would immediately return to us without condition or limitation’. In addition, he moved that ‘that we might not so much as promise any moderation or mitigation to any about the king’ nor make any commitment to vote him supply before he returned to Parliament. Both motions were rejected by the House – more ‘in respect of the person that made them’, according to D’Ewes, than their uncompromising tenor. The best that D’Ewes could come up with to explain Vane’s hard-line stance was that he was desperate to ingratiate himself with fiery spirits such as Pym and Hampden in order to avoid prosecution for his record during the personal rule.363CJ ii. 764a; PJ iii. 357. A more plausible explanation for his militancy – beyond the simple conviction that it was unsafe to make peace with Charles until he had abandoned evil counsellors like Lord Digby and thrown himself on Parliament’s mercy – is the fact that Vane’s properties in the north were, or were about to be, seized by the royalists and that it would require a determined effort by English and possibly Scottish force of arms to get them back.

In fact, Vane’s parliamentary appointments and contributions to debate during the first year of the war are consistent not with the radical bent shown by Vane II but a more practical and undemonstrative commitment to advancing Parliament’s claims in England and Ireland and to ensuring that they were respected abroad. Between September 1642 and the summer of 1643, when he spent two months or so away from the House, he was appointed to a minimum of 18 committees – six of which he was named to in first place – and the true number of his appointments may have been two or even three times that figure.364CJ ii. 764a, 785b, 795b, 852b, 865a, 882a, 883a, 883b, 984a, 989a, 994b; iii. 3b, 34a, 44a, 50b, 104b, 125b, 132a; Harl. 164, f. 366v; Harl. 165, ff. 109, 113; Add. 31116, p. 18. The main areas of parliamentary business in which he was active are easier to identify. On 14 September and again on 21 December 1642, the Commons ordered that Vane’s standing committee for trade be revived, and in addition to his work on this body he was named to several ad hoc committees concerning mercantile affairs, one of which he also chaired.365CJ ii. 765a, 814b, 898a, 954b; iii. 44a; Add. 18777, f. 153. Diplomatic and foreign relations were among his other areas of specialisation at Westminster, accounting for at least half a dozen of his committee appointments between September and June. As might be expected, he was particularly closely involved in trying to strengthen or, where necessary, repair Parliament’s relations with the Dutch and the queen of Bohemia. Letters sent to Vane from several Dutch towns, ‘expressing their affection and great zeal to the service of the state and of the Protestant religion in Ireland and their willingness to do something for the preservation of it there’, were referred on 9 June 1643 to Vane, Edmund Calamy and other godly ministers, and also to a committee for Irish affairs that Vane chaired, to ensure that Ireland’s Protestants benefitted from these offers of assistance.366CJ ii. 785b, 865a, 873a, 986b, 989a; iii. 34a, 122a, 125b; Add. 18777, ff. 150v, 171v; Harl. 164, f. 366; Harl. 165, f. 109.

Vane’s Irish committee had been set up after a wide-ranging debate on Ireland on 28 February 1643, and its brief was to consider ‘what course may be most necessary and requisite for the speedy supply and safety of the kingdom of Ireland’ – which in practice meant investigating the costing of the war effort there, finding new resources to sustain it and organising sufficient naval support. Vane made several reports from his ‘committee for Irish affairs’ during the spring of 1643, clashing in the process with the chairman of the joint Committee for Irish Affairs, John Goodwyn, over how seriously the House should take the warnings of Protestant leaders in Dublin that the war effort would collapse unless Parliament sent them more money. For his part, Vane thought this ‘mere threatening of us’ should not be encouraged.367CJ ii. 984a, 999b; iii. 6a, 6b, 26b, 47b, 60a; Harl. 164, ff. 332v, 370, 370v; Add. 18777, ff. 167-8; Add. 31116, p. 87; R. Armstrong, ‘Ireland at Westminster’, in Parliament at Work ed. C. Kyle, J. Peacey (Woodbridge, 2002), 86-7.

Vane is not always easy to place in relation to the central question at Westminster in 1642-3 of whether to push for victory over the king, if necessary by bringing in the Scots, or to seek a swift, negotiated end to the civil war. During a debate early in October 1642 on the Yorkshire treaty of neutrality, he refrained from following Pym and other fiery spirits in condemning the treaty’s architects, Ferdinando, 2nd Baron Fairfax* and his allies. Instead, he urged that the matter be referred to the Committee of Safety, ‘for it we dishearten such as have made this conclusion of peace, we may leave all upon Sir Edward Rodes* and Mr [John] Hotham*’ – two of the Fairfaxes’ main rivals for the leadership of the parliamentarian party in Yorkshire.368Supra, ‘Ferdinando Lord Fairfax’; Add. 18777, f. 20. On the other hand, when at the end of October the militantly pro-war MP for Newcastle, John Blakiston, drew the House’s attention to the commissioning of Catholics by the king’s commander in the north, William Cavendish, 1st earl of Newcastle, it was Vane who moved that Blakiston attend the CS to relate news of this new ‘popish’ army – information that the Commons turned into a potent propaganda weapon. That same day (28 Oct.), Vane made a report from the CS – though there is no mention of such in the Journal for that day – ‘declaring that the main affairs of the kingdom lay so heavy upon them that they were not able to manage them alone’, and therefore they proposed ‘that some four committees be chosen to dispatch the affairs of the kingdom’.369Add. 31116, p. 8; Add. 18777, f. 45; c.f. L. Glow, ‘The cttee. of safety’, EHR lxxx. 305. In response, the Commons set up committees for receiving dispatches, bringing in money, examining prisoners and quartering soldiers, and it ordered that ‘all committees except these four’ and several major standing committees ‘do cease from sitting ... until this House shall take further order.370CJ ii. 825b.

Vane’s membership of the Committee of Safety, let alone his reports from it and his defence of its proceedings against criticism from the fiery spirits, have been completely ignored – or rather, they been obscured by being assigned wholesale to Vane II, even though Vane I was undoubtedly the more active member of the committee, signing almost twice as many of its warrants as Vane II.371Harl. 164, f. 369v; Glow, ‘Cttee. of safety’, 301, 305, 308, 313. The attractiveness of Vane II to whiggish sensibilities, and the general assumption that his father’s career post-1641 was one of decline fading into irrelevance, has blinded historians to Vane I’s presence. The fact that his signature and that of Vane II were very similar is hardly an excuse, for at least nine CS warrants were signed by both men, and on one of these occasions Vane II actually signed himself ‘Vane junr’.372SP28/261, ff. 126, 382; SP28/262, f. 226; SP28/264, ff. 64, 301, 343, 379, 381, 429. Moreover, on some warrants Vane I’s signature appears twice – once as a member of the CS and a second time as part of a five-man committee set up on 8 March 1643 to peruse every warrant or order by the Commons or the CS for disbursing money and to authorise part or complete payment and in such order as it saw fit.373Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; CJ ii. 994b; SP28/262, f. 284; SP28/263-4, passim; Add. 5497, ff. 14, 61, 63, 66, 67, 92, 93, 97, 98, 100, 101.

Vane made a major report from the Committee of Safety on 17 December 1642, ‘touching what course had been resolved upon for the defence of Yorkshire and other northern counties of the kingdom against the earl of Newcastle’s army’ – whereupon the House issued a stream of orders for strengthening Lord Fairfax’s command in the north.374CJ ii. 893; Harl. 164, ff. 264v-265. Named to various ad hoc committees to advance the war effort in the north east, he was very likely involved in organising parliamentarian resistance in the region during the first year of the war.375CJ ii. 802a; iii. 46a, 104b. Yet he seems to have had reservations about one obvious strategy for regaining the northern counties for Parliament – that is, inviting in the Scots. On 15 December, during a debate on providing a naval guard on the north-east coast to prevent the royalists shipping over arms from Holland, he advised those who favoured seeking Scottish assistance that such a motion was fit only in ‘a full House’ – where it would likely encounter stiff resistance. Moreover, he claimed that most of the Scots near the border were ‘of the king’s party and ill-affected, and until we can provide money [for Scottish soldiers, he] ... would not have us call in the Scots. We shall shortly have two men at Edinburgh to treat for us with that state’.376Add. 18777, ff. 95v, 96.

Vane’s apparent ambivalence on the issue of bringing in the Scots did not preclude what seems to have been a firm commitment to strengthening Parliament’s war machine. At least half a dozen of his committee appointments during 1642-3 – and perhaps two or three times that number if the clerk had been more careful to distinguish him from Vane II – point to him being part of that group at Westminster (of which Vane II was a leading member) that sought to stiffen the martial zeal of Parliament’s commander-in-chief, the earl of Essex, and to raise money and men in London to augment his army.377CJ ii. 795b, 814a, 835a, 838a, 838b, 841a, 845b, 849a, 852b, 860a, 863b, 866a, 892b, 945b, 971a, 983a; iii. 9b, 23b, 30b, 41a, 80a; Add. 31116, p. 18. Late in December 1642, Vane himself pledged to donate £80 towards the maintenance of Essex’s army – which was more than most MPs offered, including Pym.378Add. 18777, f. 110.

The bishops’ wars would doubtless have left Vane thoroughly acquainted with the business of raising and supplying armies. But his real area of expertise was naval administration. He was still a member of Grene’s navy committee when its powers were augmented in August 1642 and it became the Committee of Navy and Customs*, with oversight of naval finance and officials.379Supra, ‘Committee of Navy and Customs’; CJ ii. 378b, 706a. Two months later, in October, he was appointed to the first Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports*, which was set up to manage the operational and strategic side of naval affairs. Comprising three peers (Warwick, Northumberland and Holland) and six members of the Committee of Navy and Customs (including Vane I and Vane II), this committee, during ‘the first year of these unhappy distractions ... did discharge the office of the lord high admiral and of the judge of the admiralty and with inexpressible trouble and care ... did, by the order of the Parliament, wade through those intricate cases which fell out that first year’.380Supra, ‘Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports’; CJ ii. 812b; LJ v. 407b; G. Grene, A Declaration in Vindication of the Honour of the Parliament (1647), 13 (E.405.8). His considerable experience in admiralty business notwithstanding, Vane I does not appear to have been active on this committee – which was perhaps just as well, for the commander of Parliament’s fleet, the earl of Warwick, had recently clashed with both Vanes over control of the kingdom’s postal service and the considerable profits that went with it. The earl was particularly resentful of Vane I’s proceedings in this dispute, accusing him of trying to ‘publicly asperse me ... whereof I am very sensible’. Warwick had responded by marshalling his ‘friends’ at Westminster against Vane, ‘that I may not during my employment ... in the service of the commonwealth [as commander of the fleet], suffer in mine own particular affairs which so much concern both mine honour and profit’.381Supra, ‘Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports’; infra, ‘Thomas Withring’; Hunts. RO, Acc. 2091, no. 497.

Vane I resumed his prominent position in naval affairs on becoming chairman of a Commons’ committee set up on 16 September 1643 – and referred to in the Journals, somewhat confusingly, as ‘the committee for the navy’ – for treating with the customs commissioners as to ‘how the present necessities of the navy may be supplied and the occasions of the navy upheld for the future’.382CJ iii. 243b, 248b, 254a, 258b, 274b, 283a. He continued to chair this committee until 2 November, when the Commons ordered that it be merged with the Committee of Navy and Customs.383CJ iii. 299a. Vane was an active and important member of this enlarged navy committee until at least mid-1644. He also figured prominently in measures during 1643-5 to find money for the navy, to manage the excise (much of the proceeds of which went towards the navy) and to transfer command of the fleet from the Admiralty Committee to the earl of Warwick.384CJ iii. 213b, 222a, 243b, 246b, 310a, 310b, 312b, 326b, 329a, 356a, 364b, 532b; iv. 57a, 722a; Add. 18778, ff. 18v, 48, 52v; Add. 18779, f. 48.

Vane’s support for the war effort, although sincere, was apparently more considered than that of Vane II and the fiery spirits. When the radical combination of William Strode I and Alexander Rigby I moved in January 1643 that a volunteer army in London – independent of the earl of Essex and paid for by imposing new duties upon ‘luxuries as sack [sherry], silks, tobacco etc’ – Vane countered that the navy needed all the available customs revenue, especially as ‘we shall have 40 sail of Dunkirkers [privateers] very shortly at sea’.385Add. 18777, f. 133v. He took a similarly prudential line in the debates in early 1643 on the preconditions and terms of the Treaty of Oxford. Although his own interventions on the floor of the House cannot be distinguished with certainty from those of Vane II, it was very likely Vane rather than his son who expressed cautious approval on 18 February for the idea of a cessation of hostilities before the armies on either side were disbanded, ‘provided there be no fortification or recruiting of armies in the meantime, for this they [the royalists] may do notwithstanding a cessation’.386Add. 18777, f. 158v. The fiery spirits, by contrast, favoured the deliberately impractical policy of disbandment before a cessation, and when a motion for reversing that order was put to the question on 18 February they did their best to oppose it. At the height of the shout for and against a cessation, D’Ewes confided to Vane – who sat next to him in the House – his fear that the noes had it, whereupon Vane ‘confessed to me that he feared it also and said if God hath an intent to ruin this kingdom who can prevent it?’387Supra, ‘Sir Philip Stapilton’; Harl. 164, f. 302v. It was probably Vane who was named, in first place, to several committees in February and March concerning the treaty propositions and the cessation.388CJ ii. 978b, 991b; iii. 50b.

But if D’Ewes had assumed from their conversation on 18 February 1643 that Vane was willing to go that extra mile to secure a treaty he was roundly disabused of that notion on 30 March during a debate on whether to extend the time allowed for negotiations. According to D’Ewes, Vane spoke ‘with great violence against giving of any further time’ and blamed the parliamentary committee at Oxford – made up largely of peace-party grandees – for not moving the negotiations along more quickly. ‘I did much wonder to see Sir Henry Fane’s [sic] violence’, wrote D’Ewes

he having but a little before [18 Feb.] condoled with me that some fiery spirits did so oppose peace and that they would bring this kingdom to utter ruin; and therefore speaking with some others what might be the cause of this sudden change, we were of opinion that he had had some private intelligence from Oxford that his Majesty had no inclination to restore him to his former places and therefore was now grown to draw violently the other way.389Harl. 164, f. 348.

Vane’s contemporaries were so primed by now to think the worst of him that D’Ewes apparently never considered the rather more likely possibility that he had simply misinterpreted Vane’s remarks on 18 February. A little over a year later (Mar. 1644), Vane’s honesty was questioned publicly during the trial of Archbishop Laud. Vane testified that, like Strafford, Laud had recommended the king’s resort to extreme measures following the dissolution of the Short Parliament.390PA, Main Pprs. 13 Mar. 1644; CJ iii. 361a, 422a, 424a; LJ vi. 378b, 465b, 467. The archbishop’s sarcastic rebuttal played so effectively to the stereotype of Vane the perjured Machiavel that even the archbishop’s enemies probably smiled wryly when they heard it.

Lastly, for the honour of Sir Henry Vane, let me not forget this – he is a man of some years, and memory is one of the first powers of man on which age works, and yet his memory so good, so fresh, that he alone can remember words spoken at a full [privy] council table, which no person of honour remembers but himself ... But I would not have him brag of it, for I have read in St Augustine that ... even the worst of men have great memories and are ... so much the worse for having them. God bless Sir Henry.391Laud, Works, iv. 71-3.

Vane and the war party, 1643-4

Vane made a telling and brave contribution to Parliament’s suppression of the royalist insurrection in Kent during the summer of 1643.392CJ iii. 179b, 180a, 195a; Add. 31116, p. 129; ‘Pprs. rel. to procs. in Kent 1642-6’, 26-8, 32; Everitt, Community of Kent, 194-7; J. Eales, ‘Kent and the English civil wars 1640-60’, in Government and Politics in Kent, 1640-1914 ed. F. Lansberry (Woodbridge, 2001), 20-1. Indeed, despite his ‘fat guts’ he may even have taken part in the ‘gallant charge’ that broke the rebels’ resistance at Tonbridge.393Corresp. of the Queen of Bohemia ed. Akkerman, ii. 2; Everitt, Community of Kent, 197. The six months following his return to the House in August were among the busiest in his entire parliamentary career – although this appearance of increased activity may simply be because, with Vane II in Scotland negotiating the Solemn League and Covenant, it becomes possible to distinguish Vane I’s appointments from those of his son, and hence their true number and extent jump into sharper focus.

The mere fact of Vane’s regular attendance in the House from mid-August 1643 indicates that he was broadly in sympathy with the policy of seeking a military alliance with the Scots – in contrast to many members of the peace party, including his old patrons the earls of Northumberland and Pembroke, who withdrew to their country estates to consider their options. Vane, by contrast, seems to have had no qualms about taking either the vow and covenant in June 1643 or the Solemn League and Covenant in September.394CJ iii. 119a, 259a. Furthermore, he was named to several committees in August and September to investigate and punish those MPs, usually associated with the peace party, who were ‘absent and do disservice to the Parliament’.395CJ iii. 216b, 250a.

Although Vane’s appointments during late 1643 and early 1644 ranged across a wide range of matters, from diplomatic relations with the Dutch and French to investigating the Brooke plot, his main priority was re-vitalising Parliament’s war effort after the summer’s military disasters.396CJ iii. 241a, 275b, 316b, 352a, 360b, 363a, 363b, 364a, 476a, ; Harl. 165, f. 275; Add. 18779, f. 9. A significant proportion of the 50 or so committees he was named to (very often in first place) between mid-August 1643 and mid-February 1644 were concerned in one way or other with the vigorous prosecution of the war. He was particularly closely involved in smoothing the sometimes fraught relations between Parliament and the earl of Essex and between Essex, Sir William Waller* and other senior parliamentary commanders. On 15, 16 and 18 August, for example, he was named to high-powered committees to attend the earl of Essex ‘for his present marching’ with his army for the relief of Gloucester, and to ‘stir up the City to use all expedition’ to provide him with men and money.397CJ iii. 205a, 207b, 210b; Add. 31116, p. 139; Add. 18778, f. 15v. It was on Vane’s motion that he and Oliver St John were sent to Essex on 23 September to congratulate him on his army’s performance at the battle of Newbury and to inform him of ‘how we resolve to go on in prosecution of this advantage’.398CJ iii. 254a; Add. 18778, f. 55. At the request of Sir Arthur Hesilrige* – second in command to the general of Parliament’s army for the southern association, Sir William Waller – he was assigned the rather more delicate task on 28 September of trying to ‘mediate a reconciliation’ between Essex and Waller. After conferring with Essex on the matter, Vane reported to the House that same day (28 Sept.) that the earl was resolved that ‘whatsoever has passed shall be buried with him; and he will begin upon a new score and will give him [Waller] the best encouragement he can’.399CJ iii. 256a, 256b; Add. 18778, f. 56v. October would see Vane named to more committees and serve twice as a messenger to the Lords as part of Parliament’s efforts to persuade Essex to carry the fight to the king’s forces after the earl had intimated his desire for a negotiated settlement.400CJ iii. 273a, 274a, 278a, 278b; LJ vi. 253a, 260a; J. Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy’, in Parliament at Work ed. C. Kyle, J. Peacey, 104. Desperate to put some backbone into Parliament’s dealings with its reluctant commander-in-chief, the war party succeeded in having a committee set up on 17 October – to which Vane was named second after Pym – to consider the establishment of a council of war complete with secretaries and a budget for military intelligence.401CJ iii. 278b.

The earl of Essex’s lack of military ardour encouraged Parliament, and the war party in particular, to give more time and resources to its other field armies. This shift in military and funding priorities is reflected in some of Vane’s appointments and, above all, in a report he made from the Committee of Safety (one of three in late 1643 and early 1644) on 20 November for supplying Waller with £5,000 from sequestration revenues.402CJ iii. 273a, 298b, 316, 333a, 349a, 350a, 360a, 364a, 388b; Harl. 165, f. 255a; Add. 18779, ff. 7v, 34. The next day (21 Nov.), he and two other members of the 8 March 1643 oversight committee signed a warrant for paying this £5,000 to Waller out of sequestration revenues.403Add. 5497, f. 97. Vane admitted that ‘this might a little cross an ordinance by which the said monies were allotted for payment of the Scots’, but he thought the threat to London from the royalist thrust into the southern association justified this diversion of funds. Vane II, St John and other war-party grandees disagreed, however, and ‘much opposed’ his proposal.404Harl. 165, f. 213v; Add. 18779, f. 7v.

Vane was less active than Vane II, either as a committeeman or in debate, when it came to supplying the Scottish forces in Britain and Ireland or in liaising with the Scots commissioners in London. Reporting from the Admiralty Committee on 21 September 1643 concerning the Scots’ demands for ships to patrol their coasts, he made sure that overall command of naval operations in relation to Scotland was to rest in Warwick’s hands. While Vane II and other war-party grandees looked northward during late 1643 and early 1644 in anticipation of the Scots’ entry into the civil war, it is likely that Vane I was more concerned to ensure that Waller had sufficient forces and authority to retain the south east for Parliament.405Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; CJ iii. 249b, 258a, 276b, 387b, 393a, 408a, 409b; Harl. 165, f. 253b; Add. 18778, f. 51; Add. 18779, ff. 25, 31v; Add. 31116, pp. 233, 234-5. This would certainly account for the leading role Vane played as a conference reporter and committeeman on 20 December to pressure Essex into obeying a request from the Committee of Safety for marching some of his forces to Waller’s assistance in Surrey.406CJ iii. 346b, 347a; LJ vi. 346a, 347. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that Vane, Denis Bond and Cornelius Holland used the 8 March 1643 oversight committee to withhold authorisation of payments to Essex either to put pressure on him to take to the field or (more likely) because they were prioritising payments to Waller.407Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’. Although Vane was part of a conference team on 15 January 1644 that reported ‘the great want of arms and money’ in Essex’s army, his alignment with the lord general’s critics in the House is suggested by his nomination in first place to a committee set up on 24 January to consider the condition, musters and pay of Parliament’s forces ‘and of bringing them to account, that the state may receive advantage by it’.408CJ iii. 367b, 375b; LJ vi. 380a.

The 24 January 1644 committee was the first of a series of such bodies during 1644 for bringing Parliament’s overweening yet dilatory commander-in-chief more firmly under parliamentary control. The most comprehensive and important of these initiatives was the Committee of Both Kingdoms* (CBK). Vane was named to the committee for drawing up the ordinance for this Anglo-Scottish executive (30 Jan.), to justify its terms in the face of opposition from Essex’s supporters in the Lords (10 Feb.) and to the committee itself (16 Feb., May).409CJ iii. 382a, 391b, 392b, 395b, 504a; LJ vi. 430a, 542b. Vane was apparently keen by early 1644 to mend fences with his former enemies in Scotland, hosting a dinner for the Scots commissioners in January that was probably attended also by Vane II and other leaders of the pro-Scottish alliance at Westminster.410Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 121-2. Vane I can undoubtedly be located towards the anti-Essexian wing of the CBK, although again, his status as an ally of the war-party grandees and member of Parliament’s most powerful executive body has either been ignored or excited little comment.

The Committee for the Revenue

Vane’s appointment to the Committee of Both Kingdoms acknowledged not only his alignment with those determined to wrest control of the war effort from Essex’s hands but also his chairmanship of another of Parliament’s major executive agencies – the Committee for the Revenue* (CR). Vane had been a leading member of the royal treasury commission set up in May 1641 and styled ‘the committee for his Majesty’s revenue’ but had been omitted from this body when the king had renewed it in February 1642.411Rymer, Foedera, ix. pt. 3, p. 47; PRO30/24/7/465; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 128. Anxious to retain control of royal finances, in September 1642 the Commons set up its own standing ‘committee for the king’s revenue’ – to which Vane, Pym and several other leading Members were added – and this body was superseded on 25 April 1643 by the smaller, more authoritative ‘committee for his Majesty’s revenue’, comprising seven members and chaired by Vane. By an ordinance of 21 September – which Vane presented to the House and probably helped to draft – the 25 April committee was itself transformed into the Committee for the Revenue*, with full executive authority to administer the royal revenues and appoint receivers and manorial stewards. The Lords sought to include peers on the committee early in 1644, but the CR did not become a bi-cameral body until March 1646 and the addition of Northumberland, Pembroke, William Fiennes, Viscount Saye and Sele and two other pro-army peers. This influx of Independent grandees strengthened what seems to have been the committee’s pre-existing bias towards the anti-Essex interest at Westminster. Almost all the Commons’ members of the committee, from Vane downwards, were war-party men, and several of them were noted enemies of the lord general.412Supra, ‘Committee for the Revenue’.

The Committee for the Revenue appears to have handled relatively trivial sums of money during its early years, for by September 1643 there was little of the exchequer still under parliamentary control for Vane and his colleagues to administer.413Add. 18780, f. 8v; Harl. 166, f. 181v; CSP Dom. 1645-7, pp. 125, 126. In May 1644, Vane brought in an account of what rents the CR had received, ‘and the total ... did not amount to much above £30,000, whereas formerly it did amount to near upon £900,000’ a year.414Add. 31116, p. 279; Harl. 166, f. 65v. Certainly the CR’s efforts late in 1643 and early 1644 to sort out the court of wards – nominate new officers and bring in arrears – would have added very little to Parliament’s coffers.415CJ iii. 317a, 336a, 403a, 404b, 435b, 438; Harl. 166, ff. 16, 39; Add. 31116, p. 197; Add. 18779, ff. 4v, 27v, 40v, 56v; Belvoir, QZ.24, f. 37. Revenue streams into the exchequer of receipt are not likely to have returned to something like their pre-war levels until 1646. But once they had done so the CR administered a very considerable amount of money indeed – no less than £1,000,000 according to a pamphlet published in September 1647.416An Eye-Salve for the Armie (1647), sig. A2v (E.407.16).

There is much evidence to suggest that Vane and his fellow committeemen used their considerable patronage in terms of bestowing offices and in expediting or hindering claims upon the exchequer revenues to reward themselves and their political allies and dependents and to freeze out their enemies.417Supra, ‘Committee for the Revenue’; WO47/1, ff. 106r-v; Belvoir, PZ.1, ff. 4, 4a, 39, 91; D. Holles, Mems. (1699), 132-7; J. Adamson, ‘Parliamentary management, men-of-business and the House of Lords, 1640-9’, in A Pillar of the Constitution: The House of Lords in British Politics, 1640-1784 ed. C. Jones (1989), 37-8, 44; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 134. Vane was among the leading culprits in this respect, arranging for his royalist son Sir George Vane to be appointed to the lucrative office of receiver of royal revenues in county Durham and installing his client Edward Cosin as clerk to the CR – a post reputedly worth £1,500 to £2,000 a year.418CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 97, 120; 1645-7, pp. 58, 84, 106, 125, 202; Lilburne, Resolved Mans Resolution, 18; The Mystery of the Good Old Cause Briefly Unfolded (1660), 32-3 (E.1923.2); Aylmer, State’s Servants, 246, 408. The Commons apparently saw no impropriety in Vane exploiting his position on the CR for personal advantage. Indeed, when his revenue-committee colleague John Glynne presented a petition to the Commons on his behalf in March 1644, claiming losses of £20,000 as a result of royalist plundering of his northern estate (in his will, Vane would put this figure at £16,000), the House ordered that he should continue to receive his royal pensions worth £1,100 a year, as well as arrears and other money owed him by the king, out of royal revenues – which, of course, were administered by Vane’s committee.419CJ iii. 426b; Harl. 166, f. 32; Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, ii. 114-15.

In his reports from to the House as chairman of the CR, Vane occasionally provided overviews concerning its receipts and disbursements.420CJ iii. 438b, 507a, 522b, 643a; iv. 69b, 200a, 724a; v. 114b, 284a; Harl. 166, ff. 39v, 65v, 70, 181v; Add. 31116, p. 199. But in general the Commons seems to have shown little interest in subjecting the committee’s proceedings to close scrutiny or supervision. The House passed apparently without demur an order that Vane reported on 6 January 1644 for authorising the commissioners of the great seal to issue patents of office on the basis of warrants from the CR – and therefore without direct reference to Parliament. It was only when the Lords refused to pass this order that it was subsequently amended so that it referred to the office of county escheator only. Vane, however, seems to have used his position as chairman of the CR to obtain personal grants of office from the commissioners of the great seal.421CJ iii. 358b, 474b; LJ vi. 544b; Add. 18779, f. 40v; CSP Dom. 1654, p. 194.

When it came to other people’s finances as opposed to his own, Vane was evidently something of a stickler for due process – and, as he doubtless appreciated, the CR would not function properly unless more teeth were added to Parliament’s financial administration. It was at his prompting and in line with his suggestions that the House passed a series of resolutions on 4 November 1643 aimed at establishing an extra-parliamentary standing committee ‘to take and receive the accounts of all persons whatsoever that are chargeable for any monies or other goods received or issued for the service of the public’.422Supra, ‘Committee of Accounts’; Add. 18778, f. 82; Add. 18779, f. 4v; CJ iii. 301b-302a. An ordinance was drafted for setting up the proposed committee, but it ran into difficulties in the Lords – some peers objecting to the nomination of William Prynne* – whereupon the Commons set up a committee on 17 February, to which Vane was named first, for ‘adhering to the ordinance of accounts as it went from hence’. Five days later, the ordinance was passed by the Lords and the Committee of Accounts* was duly established.423Supra, ‘Committee of Accounts’; CJ iii. 402a; J. Peacey, ‘’Politics, accounts and propaganda in the Long Parliament’, in Parliament at Work ed. Kyle, Peacey, 61.

Roles and alignments, 1644-5

Vane’s membership of the Committee of Both Kingdoms and chairmanship of the Committee for the Revenue highlight his status as one of the most influential Parliament-men of the civil-war period. He attended the CBK regularly during 1644 and 1645 and was appointed to its sub-committees on (among other things) the war effort in the north and the south east (with specific reference to Waller and his army); Irish affairs; diplomatic dealings with the Dutch republic and other foreign states; naval policy; relations with the Scots; and for framing the Uxbridge peace propositions.424CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 64, 111, 136, 181, 375, 408, 433; 1644-5, pp. 49, 50, 123, 130, 177, 183, 252, 392, 412, 423, 510. He also made at least ten reports (and possibly as many as 16) from the committee during 1644 and 1645, on a range of subjects from the suppression of unauthorised accounts of military proceedings in the north (most of which were detrimental to the Scots) to the sending of peace propositions to the king.425CJ iii. 572b, 574a, 633b-634a, 648a, 690b, 692b; iv. 44a, 81b, 112a, 188a, 188b, 231a, 474b, 546a; Harl. 166, ff. 101v, 123, 153v, 184v, 201v, 212, 222v; Add. 31116, pp. 303-4, 396; Add. 18780, ff. 56, 57; Mercurius Aulicus no. 19 (5-11 May 1644), 975 (E.49.23). His determination to block Dutch attempts in the summer of 1644 to mediate a peace between king and Parliament suggests that he personally did not favour negotiations at this stage.426Harl. 166, f. 101v.

Between the establishment of the CBK in February 1644 and Vane’s dispatch into the north in the spring of 1645 as a commissioner to the Scottish army, he was named to about 60 committees – frequently in first place – and served as a messenger to the Lords on four occasions.427CJ iii. 566a, 643a, 647b, 722a; LJ vi. 642b; vii. 5a, 94b. The majority of these appointments related in one way or other to three main areas of parliamentary business – the management and advancement of the war effort in England and Ireland, the regulation of Parliament’s finances (particularly on the accounts side) and diplomatic relations with the Dutch, French and Swedish. Both the Vanes were now closely involved in Parliament’s efforts to manage and maintain Waller’s army in the south east and to find resources for the Scottish armies in northern England and Ulster, and it is not always easy to demarcate their respective roles in these areas.428CJ iii. 408a, 409b, 437a, 439b, 462b, 489a, 495b, 498a, 532b, 535a, 536b, 544b, 552b, 555a, 568a, 574a, 580b, 593a, 601a, 602b, 609a, 634b, 670a, 673b, 676a, 689b; iv. 3a, 8a, 23b, 84a, 94a, 102b, 116a, 123b; LJ vi. 675a; Harl. 166, ff. 62, 77v, 108v-109; PRO31/3/77, f. 108; HMC Portland, i. 219-20. However, it was Vane I who was employed by the CBK in April 1644 to spearhead efforts in Kent to find additional forces for Waller’s army in anticipation of a renewed royalist offensive against the southern association.429CJ iii. 459b; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 94, 95, 98.

But the region that occupied most of Vane’s I’s time and interest at Westminster from early 1644 was county Durham and Northumberland, now recaptured for Parliament by the Scots.430CJ iii. 688a, 733a; iv. 38a; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 186. From the spring of that year he was the recipient of a series of Commons’ orders and committee appointments for settling the government of county Durham, managing the coal trade at Newcastle and for establishing a godly ministry in the north east.431CJ iii. 508b, 511b, 515b, 522b, 593a, 597b, 617b, 645b, 714a, 715a; iv. 97b; LJ vi. 677a; Harl. 166, ff. 67v, 76; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 183. Parliament’s commissioners in the north – Sir William Armyne*, Richard Barwis* and their colleagues – not to mention his son Sir George Vane and several of Newcastle’s coal magnates, looked to him for guidance and support at Westminster.432CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 47, 74-5, 96-8, 102-3, 120-3, 136, 162-3, 174, 274, 288-9, 299, 310. Vane’s principal parliamentary collaborators in this regard were the Newcastle MP and future regicide John Blakiston and the MP for Berwick and client of the earl of Northumberland, Sir Thomas Widdrington. Blakiston almost certainly owed his office as auditor of the revenues for the north part of the duchy of Lancaster – a place in the gift of the Committee for the Revenue – to Vane’s patronage.433SC6/CHASI/1662, m. 11d. In turn, the Vanes looked to Blakiston for assistance in furthering their various northern businesses at Westminster.434CSP Dom. 1645-7, pp. 123-4, 155, 166, 183. Relations between Vane I and Blakiston probably became strained in 1646 as a result of Blakiston’s prosecution of the Newcastle common council’s dispute with Vane over his ballast shore at South Shields.435Tyne and Wear Archives, MD/NC/1/1, p. 200; MD/NC/2/1, pp. 58, 65, 77, 78; R. Howell, Puritans and Radicals in North England (Lanham, MD, 1984), 59. Nevertheless, the two men continued to work together in the north, and Lilburne would refer to Blakiston in 1649 as ‘one of Vane’s creatures for the many thousand pounds ... of the commonwealth’s money he hath help[ed] him to’.436CJ v. 473b; LJ x. 129a; J. Lilburne, The Legall Fundamental Liberties of the People of England Revived, Asserted, and Vindicated (1649), 19 (E.560.14). During 1644-5, there were repeated calls from Sir George Vane and from the parliamentary commissioners for Vane to come north in person and assume his duties as lord lieutenant of county Durham. Indeed, on 17 August 1644 the Commons gave him leave ‘to go down, at his own conveniency, into the county palatine of Durham to put the militia in execution and to settle that county’. But there is no evidence that he ventured northwards on parliamentary business before the summer of 1645.437CJ iii. 593a; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 255; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 121, 174, 274, 310, 328-9.

Vane was repeatedly identified from 1645 as a leading figure among the parliamentary Independents – the faction at Westminster that sought to use the New Model army to achieve absolute victory over the king and to impose a strict settlement upon him.438Beinecke Lib. Osborn fb155, f. 239; Westminster Projects (1648), 3 (E.446.5); H. Haynes, Henrietta Maria (1912), 244. Nevertheless, Vane I seems to have played a relatively minor role in the creation of the New Model. It may have been Vane rather than his son who reported from the CBK on 1 October 1644 a draft ordinance that explicitly vested control of Parliament’s armies in the committee, in what has been seen as a move to lay the legislative foundations for their amalgamation into a single command. It was certainly Vane I who carried this ordinance, once it had passed the Commons, up to the Lords.439CJ iii. 647b, 648a; LJ vii. 5a; Adamson, ‘Triumph of oligarchy’, 116-17; M. Wanklyn, The Warrior Generals (New Haven, 2010), 141, 268. Thereafter, however, he received no appointments relating to the Self-Denying Ordinance or new-modelling until 31 December, when he was named to two sub-committees of the CBK to consider the composition and pay of the new army.440CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 205. Again, it is not clear whether it was he or Vane II who was named to committees set up on 6, 10 and 13 March 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.441CJ iv. 71a, 73b, 77a. By the time the CBK began to make more regular use of his services on measures concerning Fairfax’s army – which was apparently not until mid-March 1645 – most of the political battles surrounding its creation had already been fought and won.442CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 353, 437, 490. It is revealing that unlike Vane II and several other members of the CBK, Vane was not named to the Committee for the Army*, which was set up on 31 March and was an ‘outrageously partisan’ body composed almost exclusively of the leading supporters of the New Model in both Houses.443Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; Adamson, ‘Triumph of oligarchy’, 123.

That Vane was at least seen as a well-wisher to the New Model can be inferred from his appointment with Henry Darley* and Thomas Hatcher* in April 1645 as commissioners to the Scottish army – their principal task being to persuade the Scots to bring their forces south in defence of Yorkshire and the Eastern Association until Fairfax’s army could take to the field.444CJ iv. 105b; LJ vii. 326b; Harl. 166, f. 199v; Add. 31116, p. 407; PRO31/3/77, f. 8. For some reason, however, Vane was able to excuse himself from this mission – as his regular attendance at the CBK between April and August 1645 attests. Though the Covenanters had denounced him in 1639-40 as one of their ‘malicious enemies’, six years on they professed to regard him as a firm ally, ‘both in respect of his constant assistance in the House of Commons in everything which concerns our nation and the many favours and courtesies he hath shewed to diverse of our countrymen in particular’. Remarkably for a man so intimately involved in Charles’s counsels during the bishops’ wars, he was entrusted by the Scots commissioners in mid-June 1645 with presenting several of their papers to the Commons concerning the proceedings of their forces in the north.445Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. i. 204, 263; Corresp. of the Scots Commrs. ed. H. W. Meikle (Edinburgh, 1917), 93.

The Scots, the Dutch and northern affairs, 1645-6

Nevertheless, a number of Vane’s appointments during the mid-1640s suggest that his support for the Scots was by no means uncritical. On 20 June 1645, a petition from the ‘distressed’ inhabitants of Cumberland – where part of the Scottish army was quartered – was specially referred by the Commons to Vane’s care, and on 28 June he reported from the CBK concerning the Scots’ garrisoning of Carlisle and other English towns, which was highly resented at Westminster, particularly by the Independents.446CJ iv. 180a, 188a, 194b; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 416, 419, 596-7, 620; 1645-7, pp. 159-60; Harl. 166, f. 222v; Add. 18780, ff. 56, 57. In response to this perceived breach of Anglo-Scottish treaties, Parliament appointed a bicameral commission headed by the Independent grandee Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton and including Vane, Armyne and Hatcher to negotiate with the Scottish Parliament for the surrender of these garrisons.447CJ iv. 198a, 206a; LJ vii. 515. This time Vane joined his fellow commissioners on their northern mission and was a signatory to their stream of reports back to Westminster on the Scots’ delaying tactics and then their insistence that the safety of their kingdom required the retention of garrisons in northern England.448LJ vii. 566b, 569, 573, 592, 605, 657, 690, 691a-695a; HMC Portland, i. 247-8, 248-9. The English commissioners replied that this was ‘in no way answerable to the treaties, nor will be satisfactory to the Parliament of England’ – a response that the Commons wholeheartedly endorsed, but to no avail.449LJ vii. 694a; CJ iv. 339b. Doubtless Vane’s resentment of the Scots was heightened by his awareness of secret negotiations between elements of their army in England and the royalists.450LJ vii. 638b. Vane’s absence in Scotland was much lamented by the CBK’s secretary for foreign affairs, Georg Weckherlin. Vane was one of his best friends, he informed the French resident, adding that he knew of no one ‘at present in affairs of state who is more capable than him’.451PRO31/3/77, f. 136.

In addition to pursuing Parliament’s claims against the Scots, Vane and his fellow commissioners were active in establishing a Presbyterian church structure in county Durham and generally in settling the affairs of the northern counties. Writing from Westminster in September 1645, Blakiston assured Vane that the writs for the ‘recruiter’ elections in ‘the northern parts’ (but specifically, it seems, Newcastle) would be speedily sent down, and it is therefore not impossible that Vane and the commissioners hoped to exert some influence upon the town’s electoral affairs – presumably to counter that of the Scots. Vane’s correspondents at Westminster also included the earl of Northumberland, who looked to Vane and his colleagues to protect his estates from further Scottish depredation.452Supra, ‘Newcastle-upon-Tyne’; HMC Portland, i. 302, 325; CSP Dom. 1645-7, pp. 105-6, 124, 149-50, 178-9, 215-16. Vane had returned to Westminster by 12 November, when he was named to a committee for preparing a letter to the Scots, demanding restitution of the English towns they had garrisoned.453CJ iv. 340a. At the same time, he may have been anxious to avoid imputations of hostility towards Scottish or Presbyterian interests more generally, engaging the London divine Thomas Coleman to move the Westminster Assembly that ‘it may be reported what progress he [Vane] hath made in settling the presbyterial government’ in the north.454Mins. and Pprs. of the Westminster Assembly ed. C. Van Dixhoorn (Oxford, 2012), iii. 742. On 9 January 1646, Vane was returned the thanks of the House for his services as a commissioner to the Scots.455CJ iv. 400b. But he had already received striking confirmation of the House’s esteem of him with its vote on 1 December for the inclusion of a clause in the Newcastle peace propositions for creating Vane a baron in the event the king agreed to this projected settlement (which he never did).456CJ iv. 361b.

Vane’s intimate knowledge of Dutch affairs recommended him to Parliament in January 1646 as a commissioner to inform the United Provinces of recently discovered evidence of the king’s plans to employ an army of Irish Catholics in England.457CJ iv. 409a, 422a; LJ viii. 134a; Add. 31116, p. 508; PRO31/3/78, p. 49. Whether Vane actually made the trip across the North Sea is not entirely certain, although it is noticeable that he received an uncharacteristically low number of appointments between 3 February and 18 March 1646 – a maximum of just four – and these may in fact have been Vane II’s.458CJ iv. 456b, 460b, 462b, 477a. There are signs that Vane’s involvement in the Commons’ proceedings during 1646, at least on the floor of the House, dropped slightly from the level it had reached a few years earlier. He served as a messenger on no more than two occasions and was named to somewhere between 14 and about 50 committees in 1646, with the true figure probably lying nearer the top end of that range.459CJ iv. 480b, 676b; LJ viii. 222a, 504a. With the war now all but won, a significant proportion of his appointments were concerned with finalising the Newcastle peace propositions, handling Parliament’s increasingly fractious relations with the Scots and settling a godly ministry.460CJ iv. 428a, 478b, 481b, 538b, 541a, 570b, 576a, 595b, 608a, 613b, 663a, 675a, 719b.

Vane’s own ecclesiological preferences are not easy to determine. It seems likely that he would have preferred a church settlement that established ‘reduced’ or limited episcopacy or, failing that, some form of Erastian Presbyterianism with limited toleration for tender puritan consciences. He almost certainly supported his fellow St Martin-in-the-Fields parishioners and political allies the earls of Northumberland, Pembroke and Salisbury (William Cecil, 2nd earl*) and Lord Howard of Escrick* when they secured the appointment in 1645 of their own candidate as parish lecturer in the face of opposition from the zealously Presbyterian incumbent Daniel Cawdrey (Vane was one of the parish’s most conscientious vestrymen – a body that included Humphrey Edwardes*, Sir Edward Hungerford*, Michael Oldisworth*, Sir Gregory Norton* and Sir Richard Wynne*).461Supra, ‘Sir John Hippisley’; WCA, F2002, ff. 153v, 186v; F2003, pp. 1, 54; F2517, ff. 22, 27v, 28, 29. It is also worth noting that the Presbyterian minister Francis Cheynell recommended Henry Hammond – the eminent episcopalian divine and royal chaplain – to seek help with his sequestration case from Vane as one of the chairmen of a Commons’ committee for establishing a godly ministry in the University of Oxford.462CJ iv. 595b; H. Hammond, A Copy of Some Pprs. Past at Oxford (1647), 28 (E.386.1). Vane and most other leading Independents would have found Hammond’s Prayer-book piety much less threatening than the insistence of the Scots and the more ‘rigid’ English Presbyterians that ‘Covenant-engaged’ Presbyterianism was divinely warranted. It was probably no accident that Vane was included on a committee set up on 16 April 1646 – and headed by the noted Erastians Vane II and John Selden – to assert Parliament’s supremacy in matters of church government.463CJ iv. 511a; CSP Dom. 1645-7, pp. 127, 180; R.S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord (Edinburgh, 1985), 506-11.

The Independents’ quarrel with the Scots deepened in the spring of 1646 following the king’s flight to their army at Newark. On 7 May, Vane and two other Independents – Samuel Browne and Sir Peter Wentworth – managed a conference with the Lords at which Vane requested the Upper House’s concurrence with several highly controversial votes by the Commons to the effect that the Scots surrender Charles and his attendants to Parliament immediately.464CJ iv. 538b; LJ viii. 305. A month later (9 June), he was named first to a committee for preparing a declaration explaining ‘what cause this House has of complaint and jealousies’ against the ‘exorbitancies’ of the Scottish army in northern England.465CJ iv. 470b. That summer and autumn, he was named to committees (on two occasions in first place) for preventing French diplomats trying to broker an alliance between Charles and the Scots, for raising money in the City to pay off the Scottish army and send it home, and to press Parliament’s claims for custody of the king.466CJ iv. 622b, 641a, 663a, 675a.

Treading carefully, 1647-8

Vane was granted leave of absence, ‘for recovery of his health’, on 3 December 1646 and probably did not return to the House much before 17 March 1647, when he reported from the Committee for the Revenue.467CJ iv. 736a; v. 114b. Little can be inferred from his committee appointments in the House during the first seven months of 1647, which numbered somewhere between and six and 17, or from his only recorded contribution to debate.468CJ v. 122b, 125a, 125b, 127b, 132b, 134a, 162b, 167a, 170b, 200a, 206b, 207b, 232a, 235b, 246a, 251b, 253a; Add. 31116, p. 622. There is no obvious pattern to his (infrequent) attendance at the Derby House Committee of Irish Affairs* during 1647 – although he was not complicit in the Presbyterians’ use of this committee in their campaign to dismantle the New Model army. A tellership – one of his few – on 27 May concerning the governorship of a hospital in Wiltshire is similarly unrevealing.469CJ v. 187b; CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 729, 733, 747, 753, 759. His inclusion on the Presbyterian-dominated ‘committee of safety’ that was set up on 11 June for joining with the City militia to bid defiance to Fairfax’s forces was presumably merely to make up the numbers, and there is no evidence that he was among its active members.470CJ v. 207b; Juxon Jnl. 159; M.P. Mahony, ‘The Presbyterian Party in the Long Parl. 2 July 1644-3 June 1647’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1973), 429-32. He served as a messenger to the Lords twice in June and July, and on the second occasion, 19 July, he carried up votes intended to appease the army and secure payment of their arrears.471CJ v. 199a, 250a, 250b; LJ ix. 239a, 338a. Overall, it is likely that he favoured Fairfax and his men in their quarrel with the Holles-Stapilton faction that spring and summer, making common cause with their enemies only once, it seems, when he sided with the Presbyterians in April over the appointment of the Independents’ candidate for the governorship of Dublin, Algernon Sydney*.472HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 565.

Vane was a controversial figure among both the army’s friends and its enemies in the summer of 1647. Some of the adjutators regarded him and his fellow Independent grandee Viscount Saye and Sele as a disgrace to the public interest that the army claimed to be championing, and they urged in June that the two men be purged from Parliament along with the Eleven Members (this demand was dropped at the insistence of army’s ‘chief officers’).473Bodl. Clarendon 29, f. 249. Doubtless Saye’s and Vane’s reputations for subterfuge and venality had not endeared them to the army radicals, and the two men probably attracted even greater criticism for their role that summer (as leading members of the Committee for the Revenue) in reviving the royal court. The CR’s lavishing of money and luxuries upon Charles and his household was part of the army and Independent grandees’ efforts to secure his endorsement of their terms for settlement – the Heads of Proposals. Thanks to the work of Vane’s committee, the court, by August, was observed to have regained the ‘lustre it had formerly, his Majesty ... having the nobility about him, his chaplains to perform their duty, the house [Hampton Court] amply furnished and his services in the accustomed form and state’.474Supra, ‘Committee for the Revenue’; T. Herbert, Mems. of the Last Two Years of the Reign of Charles I (1813), 48. If this revival of the court outraged the army radicals then the Heads of Proposals were no less objectionable to the Presbyterians – and here, too, Vane and Saye were deemed culpable. The Presbyterian grandee Sir John Maynard* named both men among the group of leading Independents who had devised the Heads and were working with the army and leading royalists to secure the king’s assent to them.475Beinecke Lib. Osborn fb155, f. 239.

In contrast to Saye and most other leading Independents, however, Vane does not appear to have been among those MPs who fled to the army after the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster of 26 July 1647. In August, after the army had marched into London and restored the fugitive Speakers of both Houses, Vane was named to two, or possibly three, committees for repealing the legislation passed during their absence.476CJ v. 272a, 278a, 279b. And with many Presbyterian Members staying clear of Westminster that autumn as the Independents tightened the screw on their defeated opponents, he was added to two standing committees – the second Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports* and the Committee for Plundered Ministers* (CPM).477CJ v. 297b, 326b; LJ ix. 430b. Vane contributed little, if anything, to the CPM’s proceedings and is recorded as attending only one session of the Admiralty Committee.478ADM7/673, p. 500. Back in March 1647, however, the French ambassador extraordinary, Pomponne de Bellièvre, had claimed that Vane had stubbornly opposed a proposal made to the Admiralty Committee for allowing French ships to transport troops they had recruited in Ireland back to France. After Vane had persuaded the committee of France’s sinister purposes in this matter, it had been referred to the Commons. Bellièvre would later describe Vane as ‘the only member of the House of Commons who has any knowledge of foreign affairs’.479Montereul Corresp. ed. J. G. Fotheringham (Scottish Hist. Soc. xxx), 58-9, 145.

Declared absent at the call of the House on 9 October 1647, Vane was named to a maximum of only five committees between his return to Westminster a few weeks later and the end of the year.480CJ v. 330a, 340a, 352a, 359a, 364b, 413a. His only known contribution to debate during these months was on 5 November, in response to Henry Marten’s efforts to present a petition to the House, requesting liberty of conscience for Catholics. Vane’s protégé and long-time collaborator Cornelius Holland supported Marten, but Vane himself noted that ‘formerly one presenting a petition on behalf of papists should be expelled from the House’.481‘Boys diary’, 150. On 30 December, the House ordered him to prepare a letter to the Kent county committee, requesting that it investigate and report on the Christmas riots in Canterbury.482CJ v. 410a, 410b.

Poor health for much of 1648 – for which he was granted leave of absence on 15 May and 25 August – doubtless curtailed Vane’s involvement in the House’s proceedings during the second civil war and the business of the treaty with the king at Newport.483CJ v. 559b, 683a. Nevertheless, he attended the Derby House Committee of Irish Affairs and the Derby House Committee* (established in January as a replacement for the CBK) regularly between March and early July and again from September through to mid-November.484Supra, ‘Derby House Committee’; SP21/6, unfol.; SP21/26, ff. 139, 169v; CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 8, 329. In May, he was identified as part of a ‘royal’ Independent faction at Westminster – the heads of which included Northumberland, both Vanes, Oliver Cromwell* and Henry Ireton* – that was striving to restore the king ‘upon their [own] account ... and [to] make such an agreement with him as might not only secure them with safety but advance them to honour also’.485Westminster Projects, 3.

Vane I’s half a dozen or so appointments in the six months preceding Pride’s Purge on 6 December 1648, and his report from the Derby House Committee on 22 June, indicate that the House still trusted his expertise in naval matters, northern affairs and relations with the Scots.486CJ v. 555b, 610b, 624a; vi. 18b, 68a. He was not closely involved in parliamentary business relating to the Newport peace negotiations, although he confided to his ‘much honoured friend’ Sir John Potts* – one of Parliament’s treaty commissioners – in mid-October his satisfaction that the talks were ‘in so hopeful a way’.487Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 371. However, the royalist newsbook editor Marchamont Nedham claimed that Vane was an opponent of the treaty, ‘that he himself may continue that gainful place of chairman to the Committee for the Revenue’.488Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 32-3 (31 Oct.-14 Nov. 1648), sig. Yy2v (E.470.33); no. 34 (14-21 Nov. 1648), sig. Bbv (E.473.7). He also alleged that Vane and Cornelius Holland tried in mid-November to have tonnage and poundage excepted from the king’s revenue and reserved for naval funding – presumably under the CR’s administration – and that when a committee to prepare answers to the king’s terms for settlement rejected this idea, ‘old Harry’ and

his man [Holland] ... joined issue with the rest of their partners in the revenue ... and moved ... that they might be protected all in time to come for what they have done as committeemen of the revenue. Which is a very provident motion indeed, considering they had had at least five millions run through their fingers and never yet gave any accompt for it. So that it amount to as much as this – that the kingdom should forgive them all the money that they have bagg’d out of the revenue and [that] the Houses give them an Act of Oblivion for all their cheats and knavery.

But the committee rejected this motion as well.489Supra, ‘Cornelius Holland’; PROB11/245, ff. 421, 422; CJ vi. 75b; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 34, sigs. Bb2-Bb2v. When the House debated the king’s answer at Newport in relation to a church settlement, on 11 November, Vane – according to Nedham – was ‘most eminent’ among those critical of Charles’s failure to specify which form of liturgy he would use in place of the Book of Common Prayer. Nedham referred to Vane as

one that never spake about religion in the House before, but [he] did it now in hope to obstruct a settlement, that he may keep a finger still in the king’s revenue ... Therefore, he urged hard that the king might be pressed to give accompt what form he intended to use, because he might use one contrary to the Directory [of Worship] or more popish then [sic] the Common Prayer.490Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 32-3, sig. Yy2v.

Career in the Rump, 1649-53

Vane was apparently present in the House during the great debate on 4-5 December 1648 on whether to accept the king’s answers to the Newport propositions as grounds for further negotiations towards a settlement. However, in contrast to most of the Independent grandees – or so it appears – Vane, like Vane II, spoke, and probably voted, against the motion. Anti-army pamphleteers certainly placed him among the more radical element in the Commons.491Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 36-7 (5-12 Dec. 1648), sig. Ccc3 (E.476.2); Mercurius Bellicus no. 26 (11-18 July), sig. A4 (E.452.19); A Letter from an Ejected Member (1648), 24 (E.463.18). It is therefore something of a mystery why his name was included on one of the two near-contemporary lists of those Members who were secluded at Pride’s Purge.492A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669 f.13.62). Either his inclusion on this list was a mistake or he had somehow incurred the army’s displeasure. Neither Vane nor Vane II played any part in the trial or execution of the king; but Vane II had returned to the House before the regicide, and Vane I was signing CR warrants by 11 January 1649.493Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; SP28/269, f. 306. Exactly when he entered his dissent to the 5 December vote – that the king’s answer to the Newport propositions were an acceptable basis for settlement – is not recorded. But it was very likely on or shortly before 10 February, when he was probably the ‘Sir Henry Vane’ who was named in first place to a committee set up that day for disbanding supernumerary forces in Lancashire.494CJ vi. 137b.

In all, Vane was named to anywhere between a minimum of 47 and a maximum of 136 committees in the Rump – the precise figure again being obscured by the clerk’s continuing sloppiness in distinguishing between Vane and his son. A tally of probably well over 50 committee appointments was a very respectable haul and should have earned him a more prominent place in accounts of the Rump than he has yet been accorded. There are similar problems of identification when it comes to enumerating Vane’s tellerships in the Rump. At least nine tellerships can be assigned to him with certainty, compared with 14 to Vane II. However, in seven of these nine instances, Vane I can be identified as teller only because Vane II happened to be in Scotland at the time (Dec. 1651-Mar. 1652).495CJ vii. 76b, 78b, 79a, 84b, 92b, 96a, 147a, 222b. It is therefore very likely that the ‘Sir Henry Vane’ named as teller on a further 42 divisions in the Rump was in some cases Vane I rather than Vane II. Unfortunately, with very little diary or newsbook coverage to shed more light on the matter, it is impossible to demarcate either man’s career as a Rumper with any precision.

From those references in the Journals that do relate specifically to Vane I or that can plausibly be credited to him it is clear that his parliamentary career post 1648 followed a fairly well worn path, and saw him named to, and occasionally report from, committees dealing with the legal and administrative affairs of county Durham, Newcastle, Yorkshire and Lancashire and to manage and improve public revenues.496CJ vi. 138a, 233a, 233b, 236b, 251a, 251b, 263a, 265b, 410a. His financial expertise ensured him at least a minor role in the sale of royal and church lands – most of the proceeds of which went towards payment of the army.497CJ vi. 154a, 185b, 186b, 187b, 195b, 205b, 225a, 330b, 335a, 358b, 369b, 400a, 400b, 459b, 498a; vii. 58a, 138b, 222b, 250b. Vane himself purchased a manor in county Durham and fee farm rents in Kent and the former diocese of Durham from the commissioners for the sale of church lands.498PROB11/245, f. 422v-423; SP28/288, ff. 27, 50, 54. With the establishment of the commonwealth the Committee for the Revenue became the committee for the public revenue, of which – pace one authority – Vane I rather than Vane II was a member.499Aylmer, State’s Servants, 246. On 18 and 19 July 1649, he reported the committee’s proposals for granting allowances to former royal servants, and he continued to attend and sign warrants from the committee until the spring of 1653.500CJ vi. 196a, 263a, 264a, 264b; SP28/269, ff. 309, 373; Belvoir, PZ.2, f. 22.

But probably his main line of parliamentary business in the Rump was diplomatic and foreign relations – which is hardly surprising given his intimate knowledge of European affairs and the Rump’s eagerness to put on an impressive show for visiting diplomats. After all, Vane was the only former royal minister of state who was still on active parliamentary service and one of only a handful of Rumpers whose names foreign governments might actually have recognised. Consequently, he was regularly named to committees, often in first place, for meeting, greeting and otherwise entertaining the representatives of foreign states. On 24 May 1650 and again on 10 and 29 June 1652, he headed committees to attend ambassadors from the Dutch republic, and on 21 December 1652 he was named second to and reported from (and probably chaired) a committee to give audience to the French ambassador.501CJ vi. 149b, 416b, 516b, 517a, 522b, 554b, 558a; vii. 64b, 86a, 104b, 141a, 146a, 147b, 195a, 233b, 252a; W.B. Bidwell, ‘The Cttees. and Legislation of the Rump Parliament, 1648-53: a Quantitative Study’ (Univ. of Rochester, NY, Ph.D. thesis, 1977), 411-12. There is no basis for the seemingly automatic assumption that the ‘Sir Henry Vane’ appointed to delegations for attending foreign dignitaries or to correspond with their governments was Vane II.502Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 20; Rowe, Vane, 145-6; Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, 59.

Among Vane I’s other concerns in the Rump – assuming his committee appointments are any guide – was the promotion of a godly preaching ministry (with toleration for tender consciences) and the relief of poor prisoners for debt.503CJ vi. 190b, 196a, 201a, 245b, 262a, 327a. His nomination to committees for ‘settling the succession of future Parliaments’ (15 May 1649) and on bills for tendering the Engagement to the people (27 Nov.) and for combining England and Scotland in one commonwealth and abolishing the kingly office in Scotland (3 Apr. 1652), do not suggest a man who was wholly out of sympathy with some of the Rump’s larger projects and ambitions.504CJ vi. 210a, 326b; vii. 118b. This can also be inferred from his attendance at the committee that the Rump convened in October 1652 to negotiate with deputies sent from the shires and burghs of Scotland about finalising the terms of the new Anglo-Scottish commonwealth. Indeed, he chaired this body in February 1653.505SP25/138. Yet though he headed the list of nominees to many of the Rump’s ad hoc committees, he seems to have chaired no more than three, and these concerned relatively minor matters.506CJ vi. 185b, 195b, 236b, 263a, 233b. Vane II was by far the more active and influential Rumper. It was perhaps Vane’s association with his controversial son, as well as his own reputation for venality, that doomed his one chance of securing election to the council of state. He received 35 votes in the elections for the final five places on the second council (Feb. 1650), which should have bee enough to earn him a place. Objections to his nomination were raised, however, notably by Henry Marten, and in the ensuing division the tellers in Vane’s favour, Sir William Armyne and Sir John Trevor, were defeated by the radical pairing of Marten and Edmund Ludlowe II.507CJ vi. 369a; Worden, Rump Parl. 221-2.

Although Vane obviously cannot be classed among the most radical of Rumpers, he was probably closer in his political sympathies to Cromwell and other senior army officers than he was to the Presbyterian interest.508C.H. Firth, ‘Cromwell and the expulsion of the Long Parliament’, EHR viii. 530. His nine confirmed tellerships in the Rump saw him paired twice with Cromwell, twice with Thomas Lister and once with Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Sir Michael Livesay, Sir Henry Mildmay, Thomas Scot I and Algernon Sydney. Seven of these tellerships related to the Act of Oblivion that the House debated and passed early in 1652. Vane aligned with Cromwell and his army colleagues, as well as with Marten and elements of the radical press, in supporting efforts to make the terms of the Act as generous as possible to the royalists. He put his irenic inclinations aside, however, when it came to ensuring that the Act made provision for payment of arrears due to the court of wards. On this score, it seems, his determination to maximise money coming into the committee of public revenue prevailed.509CJ vii. 76b, 78b, 79a, 84b, 92b, 96a; Worden, Rump Parl. 268-9. His desire for ‘healing and settling’ also did not stretch to accommodating popery, for on 30 June 1652 he and Livesay were tellers against having a petition read from a group of Catholics, presumably asking for greater freedom of worship. The opposing tellers were Thomas, Lord Grey of Groby and the man with whom Vane had clashed over precisely this issue back in November 1647 – Henry Marten.510CJ vii. 147a. Vane’s last known tellership in the Rump, on 27 November 1652, again pitted him against Marten – this time to preserve Somerset House for the use of the state (one of its apartments served to accommodate visiting foreign dignitaries).511CJ vii. 222b; Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, 36. Directly after this division, Vane headed a list of committeemen to prepare a bill for the sale of various royal properties, including Hampton Court and Windsor Castle – his old haunts from the antediluvian world of the Jacobean and Caroline court.512CJ vii. 222b.

Death and assessment

If Vane disapproved of the army’s dissolution of the Rump in April 1653 it did not register sufficiently with Cromwell and the council of officers to cause alarm or resentment. In fact, he seems to have been entirely absent from their calculations for a new Parliament and probably withdrew from public affairs to live quietly on one of his estates. But the life of a simple country gentleman apparently did not suit him, for in the summer of 1654 he stood as a candidate for one of Kent’s 11 county seats in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament and was duly returned – possibly in fourth place.513Perfect List of the Members Returned [in 1654] (1654, 669 f.19.8). He received 11 appointments in this Parliament (a definitive number given that Vane II was not also an MP), including nomination in second place to a committee set up on 14 September to satisfy those MPs with scruples about taking an oath of loyalty to the protector, and to the 12 December committee for listing the ‘damnable heresies’ that would be excluded from toleration in the House’s bill for settling the protectoral constitution.514CJ vii. 366b, 367b, 371b, 375b, 380a, 381a, 381b, 382a, 399b.

This was to be Vane’s last parliamentary appointment, however, for he died at Fairlawn on or about 24 May 1655 and was buried in the chancel of Shipbourne church on 1 June.515Mercurius Politicus no. 259 (24-31 May 1655), 5370 (E.841.3); Shipbourne Par. Regs. ed. Crisp, 63; PROB11/245, f. 421. In his will, written in January 1655, he commented ruefully on the world he would be leaving, ‘wherein I have found nothing but vanities and vexations and for months of peace and prosperity enjoyed have had months of trouble and disquietness’. In the event that he died in northern England (which was not the case), he asked to be buried in St Mary’s Staindrop, near Raby Castle, ‘in the vault formerly belonging to the earl of Westmorland’. He charged his estate with portions for his two as yet unmarried daughters of £2,000 each and bequeathed the relatively paltry sum of £13 3s to each of his surviving children (except Vane II) and his two sons-in-law – the Kentish puritan and one-time crusader in the palatinate cause Sir Robert Honywood* and Thomas Lyddell, who was the grandson of the Newcastle alderman and merchant Thomas Lyddell* – to buy mourning rings or a piece of plate in remembrance of him. He appointed as overseers of his will the Kentish gentleman William James* – whom he described as his ‘ancient acquaintance and loving friend’ – Sir Roger Twysden’s brother Thomas Twisden*, Cornelius Holland and the Sussex-born regicide William Say*, who had been part of Vane’s circle since at least 1640. To each of them he bequeathed £20 to buy mourning rings or plate.516PROB11/245, ff. 421-2. Vane made Vane II his executor – although it was said after his death that he had ‘cast off’ his eldest son and that if had he lived a month longer he would have disinherited him to the tune of £10,000 or £12,000.517Letters of Roger Williams ed. J.R. Bartlett (Providence, 1874), p. 298. Vane II, ‘for divers causes him thereunto moving’, renounced his executorship of the will, and in June 1655, administration of Vane I’s estate was granted to his lawyers.518PROB11/245, f. 423. Nevertheless, Vane II seems to have honoured a stipulation in his father’s will that he be bound in the penal sum of £10,000 for the due payment and discharging of all his legacies and debts.519PROB11/245, f. 422; The Proceeds [sic] of the Protector (So Called) and His Council against Sir Henry Vane (1656), 2 (E.889.11); Rowe, Vane, 203.

Vane is arguably the most neglected and discounted of that group of leading parliamentary politicians – the ‘grandees’ – who dominated policy-making and controlled the levers of power during the period 1640-53. His lapse into partial obscurity is intimately linked with the rise to fame of Vane II – to the extent that some of Vane I’s achievements and appointments have been transferred silently to his son.520Glow, ‘Cttee. of safety’, 305 and passim. Vane has also suffered because, in contrast to Vane II, he was neither a puritan, a republican intellectual nor a prolific author. He stands condemned not only by Hyde and that self-righteous loudmouth Lilburne but also by his defiance of neat historical categorisation. A courtier, a confidant of Charles I, a church conformist – indeed, a Laudian in some of his devotional preferences – and a man obsessed with reviving his family’s supposedly baronial past, he was at the same time deeply committed to the Protestant cause and, in the 1640s, put his considerable political talents at the disposal of a faction bent upon replacing personal monarchy with an Anglocentric, tolerationist oligarchy. If the career of any man in the Long Parliament deserves critical re-evaluation it is surely that of Sir Henry Vane the elder.