At last the “man of blood,” who had tried to wrest England’s liberties, himself perished upon the scaffold at Whitehall, and in his condemnation the same author cites his treatment of Sir John Eliot as one of his greatest crimes. “Justice was certainly done, and until the death penalty is abolished for all malefactors, we need waste scant sympathy on the man who so hated the upholders of freedom that his vengeance against Eliot could be satisfied only with Eliot’s death; who so utterly lacked loyalty, that he signed the death-warrant of Strafford when Strafford had merely done his bidding; who had made the blood of Englishmen flow like water, to establish his right to rule; and who, with incurable duplicity, incurable double-dealing, had sought to turn the generosity of his victorious foes to their own hurt.”
These grisly tales of executions and of scenes of fortitude we close with a few words on that valiant, noble soul, Sir Harry Vane, to whom Milton dedicated the well-known sonnet beginning: “Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old.”
Speaking before the Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard University, Wendell Phillips, America’s silver-tongued orator, uttered a memorable word upon the man whose governorship of Massachusetts for two years of its infant history makes the name of Vane for ever dear to the American descendants of the Puritans:
“... Roger Williams and Sir Harry Vane, the two men deepest in thought and bravest in speech of all who spoke English in their day, and equal to any in practical statesmanship. Sir Harry Vane—in my judgment the noblest human being who ever walked the streets of yonder city—I do not forget Franklin or Sam Adams, Washington or Fayette, Garrison or John Brown. But Vane dwells an arrow’s flight above them all, and his touch consecrated the continent to measureless toleration of opinion and entire equality of rights. We are told we can find in Plato ‘all the intellectual life of Europe for two thousand years.’ So you can find in Vane the pure gold of two hundred and fifty years of American civilisation, with no particle of its dross. Plato would have welcomed him to the Academy, and Fénélon kneeled with him at the altar. He made Somers and John Marshall possible; like Carnot, he organised victory; and Milton pales before him in the stainlessness of his record. He stands among English statesmen preëminently the representative, in practice and in theory, of serene faith in the safety of trusting truth wholly to her own defence. For other men we walk backward, and throw over their memories the mantle of charity and excuse, saying reverently, ‘Remember the temptation and the age.’ But Vane’s ermine has no stain; no act of his needs explanation or apology; and in thought he stands abreast of the age—like pure intellect, belongs to all time. Carlyle said, in years when his words were worth heeding, ‘Young men, close your Byron and open your Goethe.’ If my counsel had weight in these halls, I should say, ‘Young men, close your John Winthrop and Washington, your Jefferson and Webster, and open Sir Harry Vane.’ It was the generation that knew Vane who gave to our Alma Mater for a seal the simple pledge, Veritas.”—Wendell Phillips, in his Harvard address on the “Scholar in the Republic.”
To the profligate Charles II. few men must have seemed more dangerous than the man who had dared to teach that the king had three “superiors, God, Law, and Parliament.” The man who had once walked through the stately halls of Raby Castle as its master found a Tower cell his last earthly abiding-place.
When Sir Harry Vane was arraigned as a “false traitor,” he made his own defence, well knowing what the end would be, but determined, for the sake of England and the cause he loved, to put his plea on record. For ten hours he fought for his life without refreshment, then later, in his prison, wrote out the substance of his plea. Though, as his biographer relates, “he had torn to pieces as if they were so much rotten thread the legal meshes in which his hunters sought to hold him fast,” his doom was sealed. Something was gained when the original sentence of hideous torture and dismemberment was commuted into simple beheading. The day before his execution, Vane said to his children: “Resolve to suffer anything from men rather than sin against God.... I can willingly leave this place and outward enjoyments, for those I shall meet with hereafter in a better country. I have made it my business to acquaint myself with the society of Heaven. Be not you troubled, for I am going home to my Father.”
“As one goes through Eastcheap to-day, out upon the open space of Tower Hill, he finds himself among prosaic surroundings. Over the pavement rattles the traffic from the great London docks close at hand. High warehouses rise at the side; the sooty trail of steamers pollutes the air toward the river. In one direction, however, the view has suggestions the reverse of commonplace. Looking thither the sensitive beholder feels with deep emotion the fact brought home to him, that to men of English speech, the earth has scarcely a spot more memorable than the ground where he is standing. There rise, as they have risen for eight hundred years, the gray walls of the Tower,—the moat in the foreground, the battlemented line of masonry behind; within, the white keep, with its four turrets.... As mothers have shed tears there for imprisoned children, so children standing there have wondered which blocks in the grim masonry covered the dungeons of their fathers and mothers. Again and again, too, through the ages, all London has gathered, waiting in a hush for the dropping of the drawbridge before the Byward Tower, and the coming forth of the mournful train, conducting some world-famous man to the block draped with black, on the scaffold to the left, where the hill is highest.... On the 14th of June in 1662 in the full glory of the summer, Vane, in the strength of his manhood, was brought forth to die.” Thus writes James K. Hosmer in his scholarly biography of Vane. He quotes an eye-witness, who relates how cheerfully and readily Vane went from his chamber to the sledge which took him to the scaffold, and how “from the tops of houses, and out of windows, the people used such means and gestures as might best discover, at a distance, their respects and love to him, crying aloud, ‘The Lord go with you, the great God of Heaven and Earth appear in you and for you.’ When asked how he did, he answered, ‘Never better in my life.’ Loud were the acclamations of the people, crying out, ‘The Lord Jesus go with your dear soul.’” As Vane stepped upon the scaffold, clad in a black suit and cloak and scarlet waistcoat, a silence fell, and calmly, serenely, he addressed the throng around him. His address displeased the officers, and the trumpets were commanded to silence him. His words, however, had been well prepared and delivered in writing to a friend, so that the world to-day knows with what dignity and truth he spoke. His prayer, however, was not thus broken. “Thy servant, that is now falling asleep, doth heartily desire of thee, that thou shouldst forgive his enemies, and not lay this sin to their charge.... I bless the Lord that I have not deserted the righteous cause for which I suffer.”
The heads of Cromwell and Bradshaw hung on the poles of Westminster Hall when Vane’s fell. Blake’s and Ireton’s bodies had been flung into dishonoured graves. Pym and Hampden had died early in the civil strife. Algernon Sidney was to be a later victim. In Jewin Street the blind Milton was solacing himself in an uncertain seclusion and quietude, with the preparation of his “Paradise Lost.” Everything the Puritans had stood for seemed eclipsed. But the truths these men had lived and died for could not die. Says Lowell, writing for his countrymen: “It was the red dint on Charles’s block that marked one in our era.”
The reign of the Stuarts was doomed, and the Nemesis of what they stood for was assured. Says John Richard Green: “England for the last two hundred years has done little more than carry out in a slow and tentative way, but very surely, the programme laid down by Vane and his friends at the close of the Civil War.” It was government of the people, by the people, for the people, for which Vane and Washington and Lincoln lived. Without the foresight and the valour of the brave man who died on Tower Hill the work accomplished by the two later heroes might not have been assured.