CHAPTER XVIII.

CROMWELL'S CONTEMPORARIES: SIR HARRY VANE.

THE

HE name of Sir Harry Vane is better known to the greater number of English readers, probably, from Cromwell's well-known ejaculation when he was dissolving the Long Parliament, than from any other association. His life has not been often written, his works have not been reprinted, and, of the great statesmen of the age to which he belonged, his name is perhaps the most seldom pronounced. Wordsworth has indeed included him in his famous sonnet

"Great men have been among us; hands that penned
And tongues that uttered wisdom-better none :

The later Sidney, Marvell, Harrington,

Young Vane, and others who called Milton friend."

Especially the lovers of true freedom should treat reverently the name of Vane; it should be had in everlasting remembrance. No character of his times. is more consistent; it was elevated by the beauty of holiness. We have no doubt that his views were far too ideal and abstract for practical statesmanship; he demanded too much from human nature beneath the influence of other principles; there was very

much of the crochetiness and impossibility of Baxter in him, but no man was more elevated and unselfish in all his aims. It would be difficult to find a character so confessedly unselfish. He was, in an eminent degree, possessed of that virtue we denominate magnanimity; his views were great, his plans were great, and he was prepared to a corresponding self-sacrifice in order to realize and achieve them.

While this was the case-while in a most true and comprehensive sense he was a Christian, and while Christianity was to him not an intellectual system of barren speculative opinions-he was so unfortunate as to be only, in his life, a target for malignity to shoot its sharp arrows at; and since his martyrdom, or murder, men like Drs. Manton and Cotton Mather, who might have been expected to treat his name with tenderness, have been among his maligners. The account of him by Baxter is in that excellent man's usual vein of narrowness and bitterness when writing of those whose opinions were adverse to his own. He is only a "fanatic democrat," almost a papist, and quite a juggler; while Hume, when he comes to touch upon his life and writings, only finds them "absolutely unintelligible" (it is not necessary to suppose that he had ever looked at or attempted to read one of them) "exhibiting no traces of eloquence or common sense." While Clarendon was only able to sneer at him, and at his memory, as

a perfect enthusiast, and, without doubt, did believe himself inspired." "Anthony Wood," as Forster

says, "foams at the mouth" (there was much of the mad dog in that Wood) when he even mentions him. "In sum, he was the Proteus of his times, a mere hotch-potch of religion, a chief ringleader of all the frantic sectarians, of a turbulent spirit and a working brain, of a strong composition of choler and melancholy, an inventor not only of whimseys in religion, but also of crotchets in the State (as his several models testify), and composed only of treason, ingratitude, and baseness." Glad should we have. been had Mr. John Forster do for the memory of Sir Harry Vane what he has done for that of Sir John Eliot. From a load of calumny and misrepresentation heaped over his murdered remains, it is the duty of all who reverence the rights of conscience to relieve his name. Few of those who have ascended the scaffold for freedom deserve more fervent and affectionate regards at the hands of those they have blessed by their heroism than he. Perhaps few of the innumerable travellers who turn aside to walk through Raby Woods, or to survey the magnificent masses of Raby Castle, the great northern seat of the Duke of Cleveland, call to mind the fact that he is the lineal descendant of that Vane who, for maintaining precisely that which gave to the peer a dukedom, with all its heraldries, expiated that which was in his age an offensive crime by losing his head on Tower Hill.

We have been unable, with any satisfaction, to discover whether the patriot was born in Raby Castle;

but the only worthy likeness we have seen of him hangs in the recess in the beautiful drawing-room there. There, no doubt, many of his days were passed; it was his patrimony and inheritance; thence he issued several of those tracts which startled, even if they did not enlighten, his contemporaries; thence especially issued his famous Healing Question, which so aroused the ire of Cromwell.

His father, the elder Sir Harry Vane, was the first of his family who possessed Raby Castle; he does not commend himself much to any higher feelings of our nature. The mother of Vane was a Darcey, and his name mingles with some of the noblest families of England. His father was high in favour at Court; but very early it became manifest that the son, neither in the affairs of Church or State, was likely to follow the prescriptions of mere tradition and authority. At the age of fourteen or fifteen, he says on his trial, "God was pleased to lay the foundation or groundwork of repentance in me, for the bringing me home to Himself by His wonderful rich and free grace, revealing His Son in me, that, by the knowledge of the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom He hath sent, I might, even whilst here in the body, be made partaker of eternal life, in the firstfruits of it." He studied at Westminster School, then at Magdalen College, Oxford; then he travelled in France, and spent some time in Geneva. What was wanting to confirm the impressions he had received was given to him there; he came home to perplex

and astonish his father, who was simply a vain vacillating courtier, only desirous to stand well with, whatever might be likely to pay best. Laud took the young recusant in hand, we may believe with astonishing results; exactly what we might conceive from an interview of calm, clear reason, with that ridiculous old archprelatical absurdity. Vane sought the home and the counsels of Pym. If the lawyer was not likely to help or to deepen his purely religious convictions, at any rate he would not interfere with them; while the touch of his political wisdom would be like a spark of purifying fire upon his mind, consuming all the false and confusing notions which must inevitably have sought to nestle there beneath such an influence as that his father would seek to exercise over him. He went to America. Bold in conception, with a rich, only too dreamy imagination, perhaps little prognosticating the strange career through which England was to pass, impatient of conventionalities, sick to the soul of the divisions and heartburnings of the Church, forecasting and dreading the ambition of Strafford, and the cruel, narrow resolution of the king; the wretched superstition of Laud, rocking to and fro in his old Gothic chair of abuses, like an Archimage with his dim blear eyes;-it seemed natural to the young man that America should furnish him with all he needed.

America was the hope of the world then. It was the sanctuary and the shrine of freedom, especially of free faith and opinion. The young dreamer