Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 58.djvu/203

 at the disputation at Cambridge before Edward VI on 24 and 25 June 1549. He attended the House of Lords until 6 Dec. 1555. Dying in October 1556, he was buried apparently at Harrowden in Northamptonshire (, Diary).

Vaux married Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of Thomas Cheney, knt., of Irthlingborough. She was five years his junior. By her he had two sons—William (see below) and Nicholas—and two daughters: Anne, wife of Reginald Bray of Stene; and Maud, who died unmarried.

Drawings by Holbein for portraits of both Vaux and his wife are at Windsor, and were engraved by Bartolozzi. Another drawing of Lady Vaux by Holbein is in the Imperial Palace at Prague. Holbein's finished portrait of Vaux's wife, which was executed about 1537, when the lady was apparently thirty-two years old, is at Hampton Court (, Catalogue of Pictures at Hampton Court, p. 196).

Vaux belonged to the cultured circle of the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI, and emulated the poetic efforts of Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and the Earl of Surrey. Such of his work as survives and has been identified consists of short lyrics. Most of it breathes an affected tone of melancholy which is unredeemed by genuine poetic feeling; but some of Vaux's poems show metrical facility and a gentle vein of commonplace reflection which caught the popular ear. Puttenham, in his ‘Art of English Poesie’ (1589), noticed Vaux's poetic achievements, in close conjunction with those of Surrey and Wyatt, and carelessly gave Vaux the christian name of his father, Nicholas, thus causing some confusion between the two among biographers and historians of literature. Puttenham wrote (p. 76): ‘The Lord Vaux his commendation lyeth chiefly in the facillitie of his meetre, and the aptnesse of his descriptions such as he taketh upon him to make, namely in sundry of his songs, wherein he sheweth the counterfait action very lively and pleasantly.’ Elsewhere (p. 247) Puttenham described Vaux as ‘a noble gentleman’ who ‘much delighted in vulgar making’ (i.e. vernacular poetry), but ‘a man otherwise of no great learning.’

The two poems by which Vaux is best known were first printed as the work of ‘an uncertain author’ in 1557 in the ‘Songes and Sonettes’ of Surrey, commonly quoted as Tottel's ‘Miscellany.’ In the last century both poems acquired a fresh vogue on being included in Percy's ‘Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.’ That entitled ‘The assault of Cupide upon the fort where the louers hart lay wounded, and how he was taken,’ was quoted by Puttenham, who first assigned it to Vaux, in the ‘Arte of English Poesie’ (p. 247), as an excellent specimen in English of ‘pragmatographia or counterfait action.’ It was widely imitated by Elizabethan poets. The second of Vaux's poems that Tottel printed was called ‘The aged louer renounceth loue.’ George Gascoigne, in a prefatory epistle to his ‘Posies’ (1575), refers to the poem as the work of Vaux, and says it ‘was thought by some to be made upon his deathbed,’ a notion which Gascoigne ridicules. An early manuscript version in the British Museum (Harl. MS. 1703, No. 25) is superscribed, ‘A dyttye or sonet made by the Lord Vaus, in the time of the noble Quene Marye, representing the image of Death.’ Another unprinted version is in Ashmolean MS. No. 48. A license for the publication of this poem in the form of a broadside ballad, with the title ‘The Aged Lover renownceth Love,’ was issued to R. Serle in 1563–4. It obviously enjoyed a very wide popularity at the end of the sixteenth century. Three verses of it are quoted with intentional inaccuracy by Shakespeare in ‘Hamlet,’ where they are sung by the First Gravedigger (act v. sc. i. 69–72, 79–82, 102–5). Other anonymous pieces (‘by uncertain authors’) in Tottel's ‘Miscellany’ may well be by Vaux. A sonnet assigned by Tottel to Surrey (‘The frailtie and hurtfulness of beautie,’ which begins ‘Brittle beautie, that nature made so fraile’) is tentatively assigned to Vaux by Surrey's editor, Dr. Nott.

Thirteen other pieces signed ‘L[ord] Vaux’ appear in the popular poetic anthology entitled ‘The Paradyse of daynty deuises,’ to which Richard Edwards [q. v.] was the chief contributor. A fourteenth poem (‘Being asked of the occasion of his white head’) which bears Vaux's name in a later edition of the ‘Paradyse’ is signed by William Hunnis in the first. A fifteenth piece in the ‘Paradyse,’ signed ‘E. S.’ (No. 33 in 1576 edition), ‘Of sufferance cometh ease,’ is assigned to Vaux by Collier (Bibl. Cat. i. 245). The ‘Paradyse’ was first issued in 1576, and subsequently passed through many editions; it was reprinted in Brydges's ‘British Bibliographer’ (vol. iv.) and in J. P. Collier's ‘Poetical Miscellanies.’ Four of the best of Vaux's authentic contributions to the ‘Paradyse,’ entitled respectively ‘Being disdained he complaineth,’ ‘Of the mean estate,’ ‘Of a contented mind,’ and ‘Of the instability of youth,’ are printed in Hannah's ‘Poems of Raleigh and other courtly Poets’ (1885, pp. 128–34). All Vaux's undoubted contributions to the ‘Paradyse’ and to