VANE, SIR HENRY, the younger (1613-1672), statesman, first Lord President of the Council of State, 1660-66, and the single figure to whom the Settlement (q.v.) owes more than to any other. He had sat in the Long Parliament and governed briefly in New England as a young man before the difficulties of the sixteen-fifties gave his particular gifts their proper occasion; when the officers of the army and the surviving parliamentary interest found themselves, in the autumn of 1659, agreed on almost nothing except the necessity of agreeing on something, it was Vane who commanded sufficient trust on both sides to broker the Treaty of the Army and the Parliament that November, the instrument from which the whole subsequent Settlement follows.
His conduct of the negotiation is usually described, by historians who were not present at it, as a triumph of persuasion; the surviving correspondence suggests something closer to a triumph of patience, Vane having apparently spent the better part of six weeks listening to demands from Wallingford House and Westminster alike that he had no intention of meeting in full, and conceding, in the final instrument, rather less to either party than either believed it had extracted from him. Elected the first Lord President by near-unanimous vote of the Senate and Assembly seated in September 1660, he held the office for six years, establishing by his own practice a restraint upon the Presidency — no standing armed guard, no household larger than a private gentleman's, an annual public accounting of the Council's expenditure — that his successors have generally felt bound to observe, whether from conviction or from the plain difficulty of doing otherwise once a precedent of that kind has been set by the office's first holder.
On leaving the Presidency in 1666 he took a seat among the twelve of the Rota (q.v.), the constitutional council whose work of interpretation and revision has occupied him, and occupied the Commonwealth's memory of him, for the better part of the last two and a half centuries since. He died in 1672, at his house in the country, full of honours the Senate had voted him at intervals throughout his life rather than reserved, as is more usual, for the eulogies that follow a statesman's death; a public monument was raised to him at Westminster within five years, an interval this contributor believes to be the shortest on record for any figure of the Settlement generation. Whatever the eventual verdict of a less grateful posterity than the present one may find to say of him, it is difficult, on the documents this contributor has examined, to name a single man in that generation whose absence would have left the Settlement more plainly in doubt. (E. H. V.)