VANE (AFTERWARDS VANE-TEMPEST), Lord Adolphus Frederick Charles William (1825-1864), of Holdernesse House, Park Lane, London, Mdx. and Chester Square, London, Mdx.

Described by a contemporary as ‘a dissipated and unprincipled young nobleman’ and by an unsympathetic historian as ‘a syphilitic alcoholic wastrel’, Adolphus ‘Dolly’ Vane was the third son of Charles William Stewart, third marquess of Londonderry.1Benjamin Moran, secretary of legation at the American embassy in London, quoted in C. Eaton, A history of the Southern Confederacy (1954), 72; R. Shannon, Gladstone, 1809-1865 (1984), 527. His father, an army officer and diplomatist who through his marriage to his second wife, Frances Anne Vane, had acquired the family’s extensive coal interests in county Durham, was a dominant and divisive figure in Durham Conservatism.2E.M. Lloyd, ‘Vane [Stewart], Charles William, third marquess of Londonderry (1778-1854)’, rev. A.J. Heesom, Oxf. DNB, www.oxforddnb.com. His mother was a friend and confidante of Disraeli, with whom she corresponded regularly.3Letters from Benjamin Disraeli to Frances Anne Marchioness of Londonderry, 1837-1861, ed. Marchioness of Londonderry (1938). As her favourite child, Vane lived with his mother until his marriage.4Marchioness of Londonderry, Frances Anne: the life and time of Frances Anne, Marchioness of Londonderry and her husband Charles Third Marquess of Londonderry (1958), 284. Following his father’s death, he assumed the additional surname of Tempest by royal licence, 28 June 1854. Educated at Eton, Vane became a professional soldier, entering the Scots Fusilier Guards in April 1843. He later served with distinction in the Crimea, but his experiences at the front seriously affected his health, and thereafter he suffered repeated bouts of mental instability.5Ibid., 290. His thoughtful contributions to debate on military matters have arguably been overshadowed by his mental illness and subsequent eccentricity.

At the 1852 general election Vane was brought forward by his father for Durham City. The campaign was fractious, with one particularly scathing commentary in the Liberal-supporting press describing Vane as ‘a guardsman with manners and habits and morals scarcely so elevated as his class usually is’.6 Daily News, 6 July 1852. His ambiguous stance on agricultural protection also drew criticism, and he was defeated in third place. However, offering again for the borough at a by-election in December 1852, he stressed that he would not vote for the re-imposition of the duty on corn, and following a short but bitter campaign in which he insisted that he would show independence from his family, he was elected.7Newcastle Courant, 3 Dec. 1852.

Vane’s first parliamentary session was a perfunctory one. Following a petition against his return, 20 Dec. 1852, he was found guilty, by his agents, of bribery, and his election was declared void, 8 June 1853.8W.W. Bean, The parliamentary representation of the six northern counties of England (1890), 143. However, in his short tenure as MP for Durham City, he nailed his Conservative colours firmly to the mast. He felt that Disraeli’s budget was ‘devised in equity and based upon justice’ and praised ‘a government who he believed were actuated solely by a wish to amend the financial system of the country’, 13 Dec. 1852. The budget defeated, he subsequently criticised Gladstone’s proposal to continue income tax, arguing that it would press ‘unfairly on the poor and struggling classes’, and in a lengthy speech he attacked the ‘confident and exaggerated assertions’ of the Manchester school, 29 Apr. 1853. His army background came to the fore when he made an uncompromising defence of the soldiers of the 31^st regiment who had opened fire, without the Riot Act being read, on a crowd of protesters at Sixmilebridge in County Clare, killing six people. Calling the jury’s verdict finding the soldiers guilty of murder ‘preposterous’, he insisted that not only were the soldiers’ actions ‘thoroughly justifiable’, but also they were ‘entitled to commendation for the discipline and forbearance they showed’, 28 Feb., 8 Apr. 1853.

Vane’s return to the Commons was swift. At a by-election in April 1854 he seamlessly replaced his elder brother, viscount Seaham (who had been elevated to the Lords following the death of their father) as Conservative member for Durham North. In the autumn of that year, however, he took a leave of absence from his parliamentary duties to join his regiment on the Crimean front. Present at the siege of Sebastopol in November 1854, he wrote his mother a series of letters from the front, giving her ‘deplorable accounts’ of the soldiers’ predicament.9Londonderry, Frances Anne, 262. He was awarded the Crimean medal and clasp, but the ravages of the war took their toll, and he began to display ‘eccentric behaviour on his return to civilian life’.10Ibid., 290. Nevertheless, a popular hero at Durham, he was returned without opposition at the 1857 and 1859 general elections.

Vane followed Disraeli into the division lobby on most major issues, but he voted with Palmerston against Cobden’s censure motion on Canton, 3 Mar. 1857.11In the 1856 session he was present for only 17 out of 198 divisions: J.P. Gassiot, Third letter to J.A. Roebuck: with a full analysis of the divisions of the House of Commons during the last session of Parliament (1857), 6. He also gave his qualified support to the efforts of the Palmerston ministry to conclude an Anglo-French commercial treaty, believing that a commercial alliance should be ‘carried out to its widest extent’, but pressing the government to delay concluding the treaty until the intentions of the French Emperor towards the annexation of Savoy and Nice were known, 8 Mar. and 9 Mar. 1860. He voted against Palmerston’s conspiracy to murder bill, 19 Feb. 1858, and for the short-lived Derby ministry’s reform bill, believing that it was ‘just, wise and moderate’, while Lord Russell’s resolutions were ‘factiously devised to catch votes’, 29 Mar. 1859. An opponent of the extension of religious liberties who believed that the effect of any Jewish disabilities bill would be to ‘unchristianise a legislature which had existed up to the present time on Christian principles’, 11 Mar. 1853, he voted against the Maynooth grant, 19 Feb. 1857, church rate abolition, 13 July 1859, and the tests abolition (Oxford) bill, 16 Mar. 1864.

Vane’s experiences in the Crimea coloured his frequent contributions to debate on military issues. He attacked Palmerston for proposing to increase the government’s spending on army barracks at Aldershot, arguing that the men who had fared better in the Crimea were those who had been left to their own resources, 5 June 1857. For Vane, training soldiers under ‘permanent shelter’ constituted a ‘paternal rule’ that would ‘disgust the soldier with the service’. He also called for a reform of army pensions, revealing that officers severely wounded in the Crimea could not claim one, which was ‘not a principle on which a great country like this ought to act’, 8 June 1857, and he harassed ministers over the case of officers of the land transport corps who had not received half-pay following its abolition, 23 Apr., 26 July 1858, 14 Feb., 4 July 1859.12Vane served on two select committees on the land transport corps: PP 1857 sess. 2 (172), ix. 294; PP 1857-58 (401), x. 250. Angered by what he felt to be such shabby treatment, he became a dogged questioner of ministers over the arrangements for recruiting troops to serve in India, 20 July and 5 Aug. 1857, warning Palmerston’s administration that ‘the unfortunate motto “too late” would be found as applicable to the proceedings of the government in India as it had been in the Crimea’, 4 Feb. 1858. He was generally supportive, however, of the Derby ministry’s government of India bill, although his amendment to ensure that the proposed council was not entirely nominated by MPs was defeated, 1 July 1858.

By 1860 Vane’s mental health had deteriorated. In April that year he married Lady Susan Clifton, daughter of the duke of Newcastle, but ‘he trembled so much during the ceremony that [the congregation] expected a fit’.13Londonderry, Frances Anne, 292. His nadir came in March 1861 when, after being found ‘in a very excited state and very violent’, throwing cigars and money to an assembled crowd in Coventry Street, London, he appeared before a magistrate, declaring that he was a member of the House of Commons, and ‘singing a tune from a popular opera’.14The Times, 8 Mar. 1861. His friends took him to a ‘private lunatic asylum’ the following day, with the press reporting that there was ‘little reason to doubt that his lordship’s mind has become deranged’.15The Times, 9 Mar. 1861. A sympathetic Disraeli reassured his mother that ‘he, who gains time, gains everything. We shall gain time, and the rest depends on Adolphus’.16Disraeli to Lady Londonderry, 14 Dec. 1861, quoted in Benjamin Disraeli letters: 1860-1864 (2009), ed. M.G. Wiebe, M.S. Miller and A.P. Robson, 292.

Evidently in improved health, Vane visited the United States in August 1861 and thereafter became an outspoken supporter of the Confederacy.17William Howard Russell’s civil war: private diary and letters, 1861-62, ed. W.H. Russell and M. Crawford (2008), 113. In an anonymous letter to The Times, he championed the South’s fight for independence and their ‘wish to free themselves from the tyranny of Republicanism’, and in a stormy debate in the Commons, he called for the government to intervene in the civil war and recognise the South, 18 July 1862.18See ‘The Civil War in America’, by Anglicanus. The Times, 6 Nov. 1861. Disraeli’s correspondence with Vane confirms that he was the author: Disraeli to Vane, 18 Nov. 1861, Benjamin Disraeli letters, 194. This intervention, however, was most noticeable for the fact that he was ‘excruciatingly drunk’ and he ended his speech by ‘falling over backwards into the row behind him’.19H. Jones, Union in peril: the crisis over British intervention in the civil war (1997), 135; J. Summer, King Cotton (2007), 145.

In 1863 Vane’s attacks of mania became more frequent, and on his doctor’s orders he was removed from the family home in the interests of ‘his wife’s life and safety’.20Londonderry, Frances Anne, 292. Thereafter his presence at Parliament was rare. He died at his London residence at Chester Square in June 1864.21Standard, 13 June 1864. He was succeeded by his only son, Francis, who unsuccessfully contested the Mid-Durham division as a Conservative in 1885 and 1890. The family papers and correspondence are located at Durham record office.22Durham RO, D/LO.