by John Butler
| Mildmay Fane was born
around 1600, probably in Kent, to Francis Fane, first Earl of
Westmorland, and his wife Lady Mary Mildmay, daughter of Queen Elizabeth's
Treasurer. From around 1615 until 1617, Fane attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge,
which had been founded by his grandfather, Sir
Walter Mildmay. Fane served as MP for Peterborough
(1620-21;1626-28) and for Kent (1625), and was created a Knight of the
Bath at the time of the coronation of Charles I. He married Grace
Thornhurst in 1628, and she bore him a son, Charles, and five
daughters. After her death in 1637, Fane remarried in 1638 to Mary
Townshend, daughter of Sir Horace Vere. She bore Fane a son, Vere, and
Fane is best-known for his friendship with
the poet Robert
Herrick, whom he knew from the 1620's and who dedicated several
poems to him. Like Herrick, Fane lived retired in the country and
dedicated his life to letters rather than to the public career which
might have been expected of him, given his high aristocratic birth.
Fane's involvement in the Civil War was short: in 1642 he was ordered
to raise troops for the King in Northamptonshire, and served very
briefly in the Prince of Wales's Regiment of Horse, but was arrested by
Parliament. After paying a fine of £2,000, and serving some
months imprisoned in the Tower of London, Fane compounded with
Parliament for his estates, and from 1644 withdrew into
Fane's best-known work is a collection of
poems entitled Otia sacra (1648), but Fane was also a skilled
translator of the Roman epigrammist Martial and wrote, for private
performance in his private theatre at Apethorpe, Northamptonshire, a
restaurata, for which he even designed the sets and special-effects
machinery as well as writing the text and composing some of the music.
Fane was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Northamptonshire at the
Restoration, and died on February 12, 1666.
Much of Fane's poetry survived, but still
remains unpublished, although he is being increasingly anthologised.
Indeed, new manuscripts have recently turned up at Fulbeck Hall,
Lincolnshire, a country house still owned by the Fane family (see
Loxley 238-39). In addition to his "retirement" poems, Fane also
included poetry addressed to various members of the royal family,
hoping that they could reverse their political fortunes and
re-establish England as a kind of Arcadia. Fane makes a royalist icon
of the young Prince of Wales (later King Charles II) as the symbol for a
Mildmay Fane's poetry is mostly lyrical in
nature, and often has the theme of retirement. Otia sacra, as
its title implies ("Sacred meditations"), contains mostly sacred poems,
and is full of strange experimental shape-poems (not only Fane wrote
Wings" and "The
Altar" are other examples) and emblems. The front-page illustration
of Fane's book shows a meditative eye of the soul on top of a pillar of
faith. Much of the poetry is also pastoral in nature, suggesting that
the poet wished to escape from the turbulence of the civil war. As
Loxley puts it, "retirement is celebrated as a form of security against
external threats and the opportunity for meditation" (224). The book
also contains poems which are quite personal in nature, and reveal the
character of the poet; in a poem entitled "My happy life," for example,
Fane celebrates his own disengagement from public life. "But full
contented with my owne,/ I let all other things alone," he says; "Which
better to enjoy 'thout strife,/ I settle to a Countrey life" (see
There has recently been a revival of
interest in Mildmay Fane, although much of his work, including dramas
and masques, remains unpublished.
Criticism and Bibliography
- Cain, Thomas. "Robert Herrick,
Mildmay Fane, and Sir Simeon Steward," ELR 15 (1985), 313-17.
- Fane, Mildmay. Otia
sacra . Donald Friedman, Ed. New York: Scholars'
Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975; 1999.
- Fane, Mildmay. The Poems.
A.B. Grosart, Ed. London: privately printed, 1879.
- Fowler, Alistair, Ed. The
New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse. Nos. 449-57, p.
360-68. Oxford University Press, 1992.
- Fowler, Alistair, Ed. The
Country-House Poem: A Cabinet of Seventeenth-Century Estate Poems and
Related Items. Edinburgh University Press, 1994.
- Harbage, Alfred. Cavalier Drama.
New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1936. 198-202.
- Loxley, James. Royalism
and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword. London:
Macmillan, 1997. 223-34.
- Morton, Gerald. "Mildmay Fane's
Northamptonshire Theatre," Northamptonshire Past and Present, 7
- Morton, Gerald. A
Biography of Mildmay Fane, Second Earl of Westmorland. Mew York:
Edwin Mellen Press, 1992.
- Morton, Gerald, Ed. A
Critical Edition of Mildmay Fane's Vertues Triumph (1644). New
York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1989.
- Patterson, Annabel. Pastoral
and Ideology. Oxford University Press, 1988. 160-63.
- Withington, Eleanor. "The 'Fugitive
Poetry' of Mildmay Fane," Harvard Library Bulletin, 9 (1955),
- Withington, Eleanor. "Mildmay Fane's
Political Satire," Harvard Library Bulletin, 11 (1957), 40-64.
Butler, John. "The Life of
Mildmay Fane." Luminarium.
16 Mar 2004. [Date you
accessed the article}.
Fane | Life
| Works | Links |
| 17th C. Eng. Lit.
||to Mildmay Fane
Biography copyright ©2000-2007 John Butler. All rights reserved.
Site copyright ©1996-2007 Anniina Jokinen. All Rights Reserved.
Created by Anniina Jokinen on July 28, 2000. Last updated on January 24, 2007.