Thomas Vaux
Thomas Vaux, born on April 25, 1509, was the elder son of Nicholas Vaux, the first Baron Vaux of Harrowden. He married Elizabeth Cheyne shortly after his father's death, with whom he had four children. Vaux was a contemporary of significant figures in Tudor England, including Thomas Wolsey and Henry VIII, and participated in notable events such as Ann Boleyn's coronation. He was educated at Cambridge, although there is no formal record of his attendance. Vaux's later years were marked by financial difficulties, possibly linked to his lavish lifestyle and the shifting religious landscape of the time, as he was a practicing Catholic during the rise of Protestantism. He eventually retired to his estate in Northamptonshire and rarely returned to parliamentary duties. Vaux is also credited with several poems published in Richard Tottel's anthology, Tottel's Miscellany, including works that were later referenced in Shakespeare's Hamlet. He passed away in 1556, likely due to an epidemic, shortly after the death of his wife.
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Thomas Vaux
Poet
- Born: April 25, 1509
- Birthplace: Probably October, 1556
- Died: October 1, 1556
- Place of death: Arnold, Nottinghamshire, England
Biography
Thomas Vaux was born on April 25, 1509, the elder of two sons of Nicholas Vaux, the first Baron Vaux of Harrowden, and his second wife Anne, née Green. Shortly after his fourteenth birthday, in the year that his father died, Vaux married Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Thomas Cheyne of Fen Ditton; they eventually had two sons and two daughters. Vaux was later said to have been educated at Cambridge, but there is no record of his attendance. In July, 1527, he was a member of Thomas Wolsey’s retinue on an embassy to France, and in 1529 he first sat in Parliament. He accompanied Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn to France in 1532. On the eve of Ann Boleyn’s coronation in May, 1533, he was created a Knight of the Bath.
Vaux appears to have run into financial difficulties sometime after 1534, as was not unusual with courtiers intent on maintaining a lavish lifestyle; he sold one of his estates in Kent and also sold an appointment he was given as governor of Jersey with little delay. He seems to have returned to his principal estate in Northamptonshire in 1536 or thereabouts and he never attended Parliament again, save for one single sitting. The reasons for his retirement are unclear; they may have been due to his association with Ann Boleyn but were more likely due to his Catholicism at a time when Protestantism was making rapid progress in Henry VIII’s court. He was part of Queen Mary’s train during her coronation in 1553, but does not seem to have returned to court, perhaps having had his fill of it.
It is not known when Vaux wrote the poems attributed to him, but they were probably written during his attendance at court, when versifying was a standard aspect of the lifestyle, rather than the quiet years spent on his estate. At any rate, four of the works included in Richard Tottel’s notable anthology Songes and Sonettes of Surrey—first issued in 1557 and better known as Tottel’s Miscellany—have been confidently attributed to Vaux, although none is signed. The most substantial is the fifty-six-line “The Assault of Cupid upon the Fort Where the Lover’s Hart Lay Wounded, and How He Was Taken,” which was subsequently adapted as a ballad. A ballad was similarly contrived from “The Aged Lover Renounceth Love,” which added considerably to the poem’s celebrity when it was sung—or at least muttered—by the gravedigger in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As with the two others, the poems are of no great distinction, and might qualify as exercises in pastiche, being exactly the sort of thing that a cultured courtier was supposed to produce.
Vaux died in 1556 in Arnold, Nottinghamshire; the exact date is unknown, but he was buried in October. His wife died shortly thereafter; both were probably victims of an epidemic, which would have been called “the plague” no matter what its agent was.