JANE, Joseph (1595-1658), of Liskeard, Cornw.

Although he was to become one of the most prominent Cornish cavaliers, Joseph Jane’s origins were relatively lowly. His father, Thomas Jane, was a resident of the town of Liskeard in Cornwall, becoming a capital burgess there in 1601, and serving as mayor three times before his death in 1636. Joseph’s early life was bounded by the town limits. He may have been retained as a lawyer by the borough during his father’s first term as mayor in 1621-2, but he apparently did not receive any formal legal training, and he was certainly not a student at any of the leading inns of court. By 1625 he was feoffee of the borough’s lands, and was elected as one of its MPs in 1625, although his service in Parliament was undistinguished. During the 1630s, Jane became chief steward for Liskeard, was elected as the borough’s mayor in 1631-2 and, on his father’s death, he was chosen to replace him as mayor between May and October 1636.19HP Commons 1604-1629. In 1638 he signed the ‘constitution’ agreed between the borough and parish of Liskeard.20Cornw. RO, B/LIS/183. The election of his brother-in-law, George Kekewich*, for Liskeard in the Short Parliament elections of 1640, suggests that Jane’s influence in the borough was strong at this time. His involvement in wider county affairs was much less impressive, although he served as commissioner for salvaged goods in 1631 and as escheator in Devon and Cornwall in 1632-3.21HP Commons 1604-1629. When Jane was again elected for Liskeard in November 1640, it was as a prominent townsman and former mayor, rather than as a man with a future in county, still less national, politics.

At first, Jane appears to have agreed with the parliamentary opposition to Charles I. He was added to the committee on Ship Money on 8 December 1640 and on the same day, in a widely reported speech, he reminded the Commons that Lord Keeper John Finch† had ‘said in one of his western circuits that the Ship Money was such an inherent right of the crown that an act of Parliament could not take it away’.22CJ ii. 47b; D’Ewes (N), 123n; Procs. LP i. 513, 517; Northcote Diary, 44. On 12 December, perhaps as a result of his new notoriety, he was named to the committee for petitions.23CJ ii. 49b. In January 1641 he was named to four minor committees, two concerning legal matters, and on 17 February he was appointed to the committee on a bill confirming land grants from the king to the queen.24CJ ii. 64b, 73b, 75a, 87b. In March he was named to committees on bills against plurality of religious livings, the granting of tonnage and poundage for three years, and the reformation of disorders in the election of MPs.25CJ ii. 100b, 107a, 114a.

This unremarkable record ended on 21 April 1641, when Jane was among the small number of MPs who voted against the attainder of the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), in the first clear indication that he was siding with the supporters of the crown in the Commons.26Harl. 165, f. 85. Perhaps as a result of this, Jane’s committee appointments came to a sudden stop at the end of April.27CJ ii. 130b. Jane later claimed that the Strafford trial had been the defining moment for himself and other royalists, as ‘the business of Strafford wrought a suspicion of faction in that body [Parliament] among them’, and he also identified religion as the main cause for this suspicion, as he and his friends also feared ‘the alteration of the church … and that the puritanical blood ran through the chief veins of the House’.28Bodl. Clarendon 26, f. 163. Jane took the Protestation on 3 May 1641, but did not reappear in the Journal until June 1642, when he was absent from the call of the House.29CJ ii. 133b, 626n. During the summer of 1642 he was apparently active in organising support for the king in Cornwall, and in November it was ordered that Jane and others be arrested and brought back to Parliament ‘in safe custody’.30CJ ii. 845b.

Jane’s own account of the early years of the civil war in Cornwall, written at some point after 1644, probably on the request of Sir Edward Hyde*, makes his political and religious views plain enough.31Coate, Cornw. 148; ‘Joseph Jane’, Oxford DNB. For him, the Cornish parliamentarians were ‘zealots, which were no great, though a passionate, company’; their opponents were stirred up by ‘zeal for the established liturgy and the king’s cause’.32Bodl. Clarendon 26, f. 163. Jane did not entirely approve of his fellow royalists. He noted that after the battle of Stratton in 1643 ‘there were many public meetings, and very disorderly’, and that some royalists started to seize their enemies’ estates ‘but without commissions’.33Bodl. Clarendon 26, f. 163v. Shortly afterwards, Jane left Cornwall to join the king at Oxford. He attended the Oxford Parliament in January 1644, and signed its letter to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.34Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573. He was among the MPs disabled by the Westminster Parliament in the same month, ‘for deserting the service of the House, and being in the king’s quarters, and adhering to that party’.35CJ iii. 374a.

In the spring or early summer, Jane left Oxford to attend the committee of the associated western counties at Exeter, ‘where I stayed until the approach of [the earl of] Essex, for resistance of whom there was much industry used in raising the posse’, and he then retreated into Cornwall, joining the prince of Wales at Launceston. The efforts of Jane and the sheriff, Sir Francis Bassett, to confront Essex in Devon failed because other commissioners would not support them, and Sir Richard Grenville* chose instead to withdraw further west. Jane claimed that it was on his advice that the king blockaded Essex at Lostwithiel, and that his ‘counsels’ were important in keeping the royalist army supplied and effective.36Bodl. Clarendon 26, ff. 164-5. There may be some truth in this: after the defeat of Essex’s army, Charles I honoured Jane by staying in his house at Liskeard for several nights in August and again on the night of 4 September 1644.37Symonds, Diary, 68; Wood, Ath. Ox. iv. 644. It may also have been at this time that Jane was appointed as an assessment commissioner for Cornwall – a position that he probably retained until the summer of 1646.38Allen, Liskeard, 86, 471. On 7 October 1644, Jane was authorised by the king ‘to make enquiries what arrears of pay are due unto John Arundell of Trerice’ (John Arundell I*) as governor of Pendennis, and to arrange payments to him and his men from the delinquent estates now under royalist control.39Cornw. RO, B/35/40. Despite these signs of royal respect, Jane was becoming disillusioned with the war. He was horrified by the brutality of Grenville, who hanged ‘many in cold blood’ after the recapture of Saltash, and forced the levying of money by ‘terror’. He thought this counterproductive, as ‘there were two parties much offended, the one the commissioners in regard they were wholly excluded from easing complainers, [and] the other men of middle rank who were hardly treated’.40Bodl. Clarendon 26, f. 165v. As a commissioner and a man ‘of middle rank’, Jane presumably felt such abuses keenly.

Jane’s summary of the Cornish position at the end of 1644 was fairly bleak. ‘I believe there is much mistake in the business of Cornwall’, he opined. Many gentlemen and common soldiers had been killed in the first two years of the war, ‘and the slain was certainly a considerable number to that poor county, and you can never think virtue so extended as leaves the plough stand still or the corn fall for want of labourers’. Worse still, the royalists at Oxford appeared to be taking them for granted: ‘the Cornish looked on themselves as left to sustain all, and thought the burden of the war lay on them too heavy, and now in the end they were all grown hopeless’. Jane concluded his account on a weary note: ‘there are a great many hearty for the king… but when leaders fail, and ill success multiplies … you cannot hope for vigour’.41Bodl. Clarendon 26, ff. 165v-6 Worse was to follow. The defeats of the king’s field armies were followed by Sir Thomas Fairfax’s* invasion of the west country, and the New Model army’s advance across the Tamar in the spring of 1646 brought royalist hegemony in Cornwall to a swift end. On 16 April the parliamentarian county committee, sitting at Bodmin, issued a warrant for royalist estates in Powder Hundred – including those of Jane – to be sequestered.42Cornw. RO, V/EC/3/3; CCC 117. Jane had by this time joined the last royalists in arms, besieged in Pendennis Castle. On 11 April he was one of the council of war which wrote to Prince Charles warning that the castle was now surrounded; on 27 June he was among those who told the prince that they could hold out for no more than three weeks; on 22 July he joined (Sir) Henry Killigrew* in a last plea for help; and on 17 August he signed the treaty of surrender that brought the long siege to an end.43Coate, Cornw. 216n, 218-9; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 467.

Jane’s activities between the summer of 1646 and the autumn of 1649 are unclear. In the early months of 1647 Sir Edward Hyde wrote to Jane from Jersey, asking for news from Cornwall.44CCSP i. 356, 362. Jane was still listed as a freeholder of Liskeard in the borough court book of 1647-8, but on 24 April 1648 he was listed among those whose estates in Cornwall had been sequestered.45Cornw. RO, B/LIS/110. It has been claimed that Jane served under Sir John Grenville when the Isles of Scilly were in royalist hands in 1649, but this is apparently contradicted by his wry comment in the same period that ‘I would serve Sir John the best I could, but I have felt the humours of a garrison already’.46‘Joseph Jane’, Oxford DNB. Pendennis had already taught Jane more than he wanted to know about hopeless last stands, and he was not eager to repeat the experience. Instead, at the beginning of September 1649, he slipped away to the continent, writing from Caen to Sir Edward Nicholas† that he hoped ‘to enjoy some mark of his Majesty’s memory of me’.47Nicholas Pprs. i. 137.

Jane’s loyalty was not fully reciprocated by the exiled Charles Stuart. In February 1650 Charles was mostly interested in the contacts that Jane, still at Caen, might have with potential creditors, and he made empty promises to repay him for raising money on bills of exchange.48CSP Dom. 1650, p. 610. In the summer of 1650 Jane had moved to The Hague, where he stayed with an English bookseller, and became a newsletter writer and gossipmonger for Secretary Edward Nicholas†.49CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 236, 288-9. In June 1650 Jane was made a clerk of the council in ordinary, although as he was never resident at the royal court, he never fulfilled his official role. And there were limits to what he could expect. Hyde told Nicholas that he was ‘well pleased that Joseph Jane is to be clerk of the council’, but when an unspecified legal position was mooted in June 1654, Hyde responded that, despite his ‘good opinion’ of Jane, he could not recommend him; apart from anything else, Jane was not ‘of the bar’.50CCSP ii. 63, 365. Nicholas was a more constant friend than Hyde. He and Jane were certainly intimate - in August 1654 Nicholas asked Jane to deliver a copy of his will to his wife on the event of his death; their wives were on friendly terms in the autumn of 1655; and by the spring of 1658 Jane’s daughter was living in the Nicholas household at Cologne – but Nicholas was also less influential than Hyde, and was not in a position to gain further promotion for Jane at the royal court.51CSP Dom. 1654, p. 325; 1655, p. 341; 1657-8, p. 377.

Jane’s position as clerk to the privy council seems to have encouraged him to try to revive his briefly-held position in the royal counsels. He was certainly outspoken in his political opinions. He was strongly opposed to any alliance with the Presbyterians in England, commenting as early as September 1649 that he thought the idea ‘strange’, as that party was weak in England and ‘false’ in Scotland.52Nicholas Pprs. i. 137. In 1651 he entered the lists against John Milton, publishing Eikon Aklastos, an answer to Milton’s Eikonoklastes, which was itself an attack on the great royalist text (attributed to Charles I), Eikon Basilike.53‘Joseph Jane’, Oxford DNB. Despite the praise of Christopher Hatton*, 1st Baron Hatton, and Secretary Nicholas, the result was not entirely successful, although Jane was anxious to promote his book, and to see it translated into French.54Nicholas Pprs. i. 207, 321; ii. 109, 146. Privately, Hyde described Jane’s work as useful but unfocused, and questioned whether ‘his writings, if translated, [were] weighty enough to gain credit in other languages’.55CCSP ii. 136, 162, 171, 339.

In the mid-1650s, Jane was free with his advice to Nicholas and others. In December 1654 he agreed with the secretary that the Catholic queen mother should be prevented from ‘perverting’ the duke of Gloucester, but also warned Nicholas that she ‘hated’ him.56CSP Dom. 1654, p. 407. In the spring of 1655 he was downcast at the failure of the Penruddock rising in western England, but at the same time wary of courting Oliver Cromwell’s* critics in the army, commenting that ‘I know it is very counsellable to unite all factions against the present usurper … yet it grows very desperate when such as rise for the king cannot own his interests’.57Nicholas Pprs. ii. 248, 306. Jane thought that the Presbyterians had now proved their uselessness as an ally, and he warned that ‘if ever we recede from our principles, we shall lose more than get’, adding that ‘every man sees that Presbytery is destructive of monarchy’.58Nicholas Pprs. iii. 11-13, 20-1. In the summer he came to agree with those who argued that ‘there must be foreign force or no expectation of strength in England’, and by October he had befriended the Spanish ambassador at The Hague – a development that excited Nicholas, who hoped that war with England might be imminent.59Nicholas Pprs. iii. 35; CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 365-6, 375. In November, Nicholas sought Jane’s advice on whether Charles Stuart should go to Flanders before he had been granted formal permission by the Spanish to enter their territories.60CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 31. Jane was busy with negotiations at this time, commenting in an aside to Nicholas that these were conducted in ‘bad Latin and French to be understood, for they venture not on English’.61Nicholas Pprs. iii. 131-2. At the same time, he disapproved of talks between the Spanish and the Levellers, and suspected that plots against Cromwell’s life were doomed to failure, saying that ‘if Cromwell live till he die by their hand, he may have many years yet to oppress the kingdom’.62Nicholas Pprs. iii. 148. Jane’s correspondence with Nicholas breaks off in the new year of 1656, so it is impossible to judge his importance in fostering further links between Spain and the Stuarts, although the later policy of relying on Spanish arms to secure a Restoration certainly accorded with his views.

Jane was not entirely cut off from Cornwall during his exile. He warmly welcomed old friends, like Lady Philippa Mohun (who came to The Hague in September 1654 ‘flying the fury of Cromwell’), Sir Christopher Wray and John Trelawny of Trelawne; and he seems to have received regular letters from his family in England, including the Kekewiches.63Nicholas Pprs. ii. 85-8; iii. 239. Nor were his financial interests neglected. In November 1652 he petitioned the Committee for Compounding, asking that his estates might not be sold, as he had been included in the articles of war agreed at the surrender of Pendennis. The committee considered this petition, but ruled that his continued attachment to the Stuarts meant that he had forfeited the benefit of the articles, and in July 1653 they allowed the sale of his lands through the treason trustees.64CCC 3062.

Money was a constant worry for Jane during his exile. In September 1655 he complained of being pursued by his creditors, and in November he was eager to gain ‘an allowance’, but without much hope of success.65CSP Dom. 1655, p. 348; Nicholas Pprs. iii. 138. This remained a concern in the spring of 1658, when Jane’s letters to Nicholas resume. In May he complained that he had been left off the salary list once more, and referred to loans that the secretary had made to him in the past.66CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 5. Indeed, it may have been problems with creditors that encouraged Jane to move from The Hague to Bruges at about this time. The long years of exile had left him disillusioned, and he commented in one of his last letters from Bruges that ‘we have little mirth, and much need of patience’.67CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 21. His depression was caused in part by a further decline in royal prospects. Spanish delays had meant that opportunities to invade England had come and gone; and Cromwellian troops, allied to the French, had made significant gains in Spanish Flanders. The fall of Dunkirk in June 1658 was a particular blow. As Jane told Nicholas

I think it’s happy if we can no more think on these declensions of our condition; but the prospect of a perpetual misery in this world to ourselves, church and nation is so full of sadness as it deprives a man of rest and comfort, and only our consciences and God’s merciful infusions can support us.68Nicholas Pprs. iv. 39, 40, 53.

This sense of hopelessness may have contributed to Jane’s final illness. In early September 1658 Nicholas told Hyde that ‘honest Mr Jane is dangerously sick at Middelburg’, and on 14th of the same month, Nicholas received news of the death of ‘good Mr Jane’, who was considered ‘of a great age’. He died just after his sixty-third birthday.69CCSP iv. 77; Nicholas Pprs. iv. 68.

Throughout his exile, Jane was concerned for the plight of his family, although later claims that his wife, who had remained in Cornwall, was subjected to ‘barbarous usage … by Cromwell’s officers’ during this period cannot be corroborated.70CTB i. 214. The fate of Jane’s forfeited lands is unknown. No will has been located, and at his death the prospects for Jane’s widow and five surviving children looked bleak. The Restoration brought some respite. In July 1660 five of his children petitioned for a lease of Bradridge Barton, and in August they were granted Liskeard Park in recognition of their father’s sufferings, for an annual rent of £20 to the duchy of Cornwall.71CTB i. 9, 52; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 212. The following summer, the children begged that as Bradridge had been granted to someone else, they might be given other land instead, but the outcome is not known.72CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 23; CTB i. 214. Jane’s son William later became a canon of Christ Church, Oxford. None of his descendants served in later Parliaments.