THOMAS, LORD VAUX OF HARWEDON. [NICHOLAS lord Vaux 2, the ambassador, had long been confounded with his son, Thomas lord Vaux the poet. Edwards in his Paradise of dainty Devises, or Puttenham in his Art of Poesie, seem to have given rise to this error, which was continued by Phillips and Wood, and adopted by lord Orford. To the acumen of Dr. Percy we are indebted for its detection 3, in the year 1765; and his opinion has been followed by Mr. Warton, by Mr. Ellis, and by Mr. Ritson. The latter indeed has proceeded a step farther, and assigns a place among our poets to William, the son of Thomas lord Vaux; but his assignment does not appear to have the warrant of authority 4. Thomas lord Vaux of Harwedon, was eldest son to Nicholas, the first lord, by his second wife Anne, daughter of Thomas Greene, of Green's Norton, in Northamptonshire, esq. He was fourteen years old at the death of his father, which happened on the Among the Cottonian MSS. is a letter from sir Nicholas Vaux to cardinal Wolsey, about the preparation at Guines, May 18, 1520, and another from sir Thomas Vaux to the duke of Norfolk, reporting queen Catherine's protestation against relinquishing the title of queen, April 18, 1533. 3 * Reliques, vol. iii. p. 336, first edit. See Bibliographia Poetica, p. 379; and Specimens of Eng. Poetry, vol. ii. p. 82. 14th of May 1524, only seven days after his advancement to the peerage. In 1527 we find this nobleman among the attendants in Wolsey's stately embassy, when that prelate went to treat of a peace between the emperor Charles the fifth, and the kings of England and France; and on the 19th of January 1530, he took his place in parliament as a baron. In 1532 he waited on the king in his splendid expedition to Calais and Bologne, a little before which time he is said to have had the custody of the mild and persecuted Catherine. In the following year he was made a knight of the Bath, at the coronation of her yet more ill-fated successor Anne Boleyn. He appears to have held no public office but that of captain of the island of Jersey, which he surrendered in 1536. He married Elizabeth daughter and sole heir to sir Thomas Cheney of Irtlingburgh, in Northamptonshire, knight, and had by her two sons, William, who succeeded him, and Nicholas; and two daughters, Anne, married to Reginald Bray, of Stone, county of Northampton, and Maud, who died unmarried. Lord Vaux died early in the reign of Philip and Mary 4. From the prose prologue to Sackville's Induction, in the Mirror for Magistrates, it would seem that lord yaux had undertaken to pen the history of king Edward's two sons cruelly murdered in the Tower of London; but what he performed of his undertaking does not appear. Lodge's Biographical Notices of the Portraits engraved from Holbein's Drawings. Dr. Percy and Mr. Ellis, in their highly valuable Selections of early English Poetry, have printed "the Assault of Cupid," and the " Dyttye, or Sonet made by the Lorde Vaus in Time of the noble Queene Marye, representinge the Image of Deathe;" of which a copy occurs in Harl. MS. 1703. They are not, therefore, inserted in the present work. But it may not be superfluous to remark, of the latter production, that the popular notion of lord Vaux's having com. posed it upon his death-bed, was discredited by Gascoigne in 1575, and is neither supported by its manuscript or printed title, which runs, "The aged Lover renounceth Love." In the Paradise of dainty Devises, 1596, there are ten pieces attributed to lord Vaux. One of those is here extracted from that scarce miscellany, on the supposition that it has not been republished: "NO PLEASURE WITHOUT SOME PAINE. "What foodelesse beast can live long in good plight? Is this a life?-Nay; death you may it call "Whereto serves eares, if that there be no sound? Is this a life?-Nay; death you may it call To the Poetical Register for 1801, that elegant scholar and writer Mr. Egerton Brydges communicated two poems by lord Vaux from the same early compilation; and prefaced them by saying, that Thomas lord Vaux was summoned to parliament 22 Hen. VIII. &c. Mr. Brydges intimates a suspicion, as well as the late Mr. Ritson, that William, the eldest son of Thomas lord Vaux, might have been the writer whose works have created so much difficulty in appropriating, and which combine (he thinks) an ease and elegance of manner, with a certain sincerity of sentiment that generally results from a long intercourse and disgust with the world 2.] • Poetical Register, p. 195. HENRY PARKER, LORD MORLEY, WAS son of sir William Parker", by Alice, sister of Lovel lord Morley, by which title this Henry was summoned to parliament in the twenty-first of Henry the eighth. Except being a pretty voluminous author, we find nothing remarkable of him, but that he too signed the before-mentioned letter to pope Clement; and having a quarrel for precedence with the lord Dacre of Gillesland, had his pretensions confirmed by parliament. Antony Wood says 3, he was living an ancient man, and in esteem among the nobility, in the latter end of the reign of Henry the eighth; and in the catalogue of king Charles's collection, a portrait is mentioned of a lord Parker, who probably was the same person. • Dugdale, vol. ii. p. 307. 3 3 Vol. i. p. 53. [From his epitaph, which is inserted in Collins's Peerage, vol. viii. p. 201, it appears that he died in Nov. 1556, aged 80.] 4 |