Reputation
Vane was widely recognized by contemporary chroniclers as an able statesman and administrator. "He had an unusual aspect," wrote Clarendon, "which ... made men think there was something in him of the extraordinary; and his whole life made good that imagination." Clarendon, a royalist chronicler and political opponent of Vane, also wrote that he possessed "extraordinary parts, a pleasant wit, a great understanding, a temper not to be moved", and in debate "a quick conception and a very sharp and weighty expression". The 1662 biography The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane the Younger by Vane's chaplain George Sikes included John Milton's "Sonnet 17", written in 1652 in praise of Vane, and presented to Vane that year.
Vane's religious writings were found difficult to understand, even baffling, by readers as varied as Richard Baxter, the Earl of Clarendon, Gilbert Burnet and David Hume, and continue to be seen so today. Civil War historian Blair Worden comments that "Vane's opaque political ideas and religious beliefs are now barely intelligible", and biographer David Parnham writes "He presented himself as a 'witness' of light, as a spiritualist, as one dispensing advanced wisdoms in the epistemological setting of an imminent and apocalyptic age of the Spirit".
Vane's reputation was at its height in the nineteenth century, especially in the United States. English historian John Andrew Doyle wrote of Vane that he had acquired "a more dazzling reputation than has been granted to the lofty public spirit and statesmanlike forsight of Winthrop." William Wordsworth referenced Vane in his sonnet Great Men Have Been Among Us (1802). Charles Dickens included the exchange between Vane and Cromwell at the end of the Rump Parliament in his A Child's History of England, part-published in the early 1850s. In English Traits (1856), Ralph Waldo Emerson placed Vane on a list of historical English greats. Sean Gabb, a modern British libertarian, notes that Vane was in the vanguard on issues of religious freedom. Although he was "among a small and easily defeated minority", his successors 150 years later "were responsible for the clearest and most solid safeguards of civil and religious freedom ever adopted into a constitution."
James Kendall Hosmer, editing Winthrop's Journal in 1908, wrote of Vane:
... his heroic life and death, his services to Anglo-Saxon freedom, which make him a significant figure even to the present moment, may well be regarded as the most illustrious character who touches early New England history. While his personal contact with America was only for a brief space, his life became a strenuous upholding of American ideas: if government of, by, and for the people is the principle which English-speaking men feel especially bound to maintain, the life and death of Vane contributed powerfully to cause this idea to prevail.
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