Sir Henry Vane the Younger

Biography

Of Magdalen Hall Oxford. The younger Vane went to New England in 1635, was elected Governor of Massachusetts in May 1636 at age twenty-three, and immediately collided with John Winthrop over Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Crisis — Vane defending Hutchinson, Winthrop sentencing her. He returned to England in 1637 and rose rapidly: Treasurer of the Navy (1639), MP for Hull. With Henderson and Wariston he negotiated the Solemn League and Covenant in Edinburgh in 1643 — the alliance that brought Scotland into the war. He was one of the Independent managers in the Commons through the 1640s and a leading figure of the Commonwealth's foreign and naval policy. He opposed Cromwell's Protectorate from Republican principles (his Healing Question, 1656, was the most articulate Republican manifesto of the decade) and was imprisoned by Cromwell. At the Restoration he was excepted from indemnity, tried for high treason on the spurious charge of compassing the king's death, and beheaded on Tower Hill on 14 June 1662, despite Charles II's earlier promise of his life. His scaffold speech was suppressed by drums.

Principal works

• The Retired Mans Meditations (1655)
• A Healing Question (1656)